Informational repository describing both the frontend and backend of the WeAudit forum website.
WeAudit was set up as a Discourse server hosted by AWS Lightsail and Docker. It is run on the crowdAuditsDiscourse Lightsail instance in the AWS Management Console on the AWS account for ChimpsLab.
The current capacity for the server is 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, and 60 GB SSD. The server was created on March 24, 2022, 6:07 PM. This capacity is free for the first three months (up until June 24, 2022), and it will incur a monthly charge of $9.99 subsequently.
The IP addresses on the server include:
Public IP: 54.234.130.2
Private IP: 172.26.4.182
Public IPv6: 2600:1f18:251:1e00:d475:3d56:4dd3:ad7a
The server is run under Ubuntu 20.04. SSH commands can be issued online through here.
Do not intend to replicate this setup. This is for informational purposes only to describe how the server was instantiated. In the SSH terminal for AWS Lightsail, type the following commands:
Step 0:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
Step 1:
sudo git clone https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker.git /var/discourse
cd /var/discourse
Step 2:
sudo ./discourse-setup
Go to https://forum.weaudit.org
Sign into the admin account. The credentials are:
username: cmuweaudit
password: cmuweaudit12345
The admin is setup with an email account. The credentials are:
email address username: cmuweaudit@gmail.com
email address password: weaudit12345
Admin login access is restricted to CMU users only. To login to the admin account, you can either connect to campus WiFi via CMU-SECURE or connect through the campus VPN through Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client.
Note that if you choose to connect to campus VPN, you must connect to the Full VPN group. If you connect to the Campus VPN group, there will be split-tunneling, and Discourse will not be able to detect that you are connected to the VPN.
To edit the website, go to the admin site once logged in.
If there are any questions or difficulties regarding IP address connectivity, please direct your questions to the Help Center (it-help@andrew.cmu.edu).
The Campus IP addresses were given by Mark Poepping and Daryl Hollinger.
This is used for adding and modifying existing features in the Discourse template by creating a custom template with HTML/CSS
IP addresses for admin login have been restricted to certain ranges only accessible to CMU members. To add an IP range for admins to login, add the IP address and classify it as Allow Admin. Below is a list of the current allowed IP address ranges.
- WiFi:
- CMU-SECURE:
172.26.0.0/17 - CMU-DEVICE:
172.26.192.0/18
- CMU-SECURE:
- Campus VPN:
- BORDER-GENERAL:
172.31.64.0/20 - BORDER-FULL:
172.31.56.0/21
- BORDER-GENERAL:
- Wired:
128.2.0.0/16128.237.0.0/16
To develop and test your plugins / themes locally:
- Follow this guide to spin up a clean Discourse instance locally.
- In the production WeAudit admin panel, check the enabled themes and plugins and reapply them in your local instance. This step replicates all of the cusomizations made on the production forum locally.
- Replicate the production admin settings locally as much as possible.
The above steps should result in a close enough WeAudit clone on your local machine. Now you can start developing and testing your plugins / themes locally before applying them to the production WeAudit website.
The WeAudit forum is deployed on the Lightsail machine as a single Docker container. This is the standard deployment strategy recommended by the official Discourse documentation.
Some customization and inspection tasks (adding new plugins, updating to a newer Discourse version, checking PostgreSQL database content etc.) require the admin to enter the Discourse container.
To do so, please
- SSH into the Lightsail machine on the AWS console
- Change directory to
/var/discourse - Run
sudo ./launcher enter app
Now you are in the production WeAudit working directory. Please refer to the official install guide to understand the Discourse project structure and the avialable commands.
- ReCAPTCHA
- Initially, this was attempted, but there is no native ReCAPTCHA support on Discourse. Therefore, we would need to create our own plugin for ReCAPTCHA, which may be a bit hairy of an implementation detail. Thus, there were some alternatives below.
- Google and Facebook Sign-Up
- Users can now sign up for new accounts on Discourse with a Google or Facebook login. Users can customize their usernames on the platform for remaining anonymous. This process is done via OAuth2.
- The Google Cloud Platform account and Facebook Developers account that manage these plugins are under the account name,
cmuweaudit@gmail.com. The password is the same as before,cmuweaudit12345.
This procedure is needed for email sign-up, but since we are directing sign-ups to be from Google and Facebook, this procedure is no longer needed.
However, if we do decide to use this procedure, we must integrate a Mail API using one of the platforms linked here. These services will incur an additional monthly charge.
Because we own the weaudit.org domain, https://weaudit.org can be an informational page that describes the purposes of our project while https://forum.weaudit.org is our primary discussion forum.