opensource-portal

Microsoft's GitHub-at-scale management portal

This Node.js application is a part of the suite of services provided by the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft to enable large-scale GitHub management experiences.

Key features center around opinionated takes on at-scale management, with an emphasis on relentless automation and delegation:

• Linking: the concept of associating a GitHub identity with an authenticated identity in another provider, for example an Azure Active Directory user
• Self-service GitHub organization join: one-click GitHub organization joining for authorized users
• Cross-organization functionality: consolidated views across a set of managed GitHub organizations including people, repos, teams

Before providing GitHub management functionality to all of Microsoft, this application started within Azure.

An introduction to this project is available in this 2015 post by Jeff Wilcox: http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2015/11/azure-on-github/

The app is a GitHub OAuth application; with the May 2017 release of GitHub Apps (formerly called Integrations), this app over time may be refactored to support the integration concept, removing the need to dedicate a user seat to a machine account.

Node app

• Node.js LTS (v10+)
• TypeScript
• Mixed callback and Q promises and async and whoa at this time

Service Dependencies

• At least one of your own GitHub organizations
• Bring your own Redis server, or use Azure Redis Cache
• Azure Active Directory, or hack your own Passport provider in
• Data storage for links, etc.: either Azure Storage or Postgres

LICENSE

MIT License

Dev prep, build, deploy

Prereqs

Install Node packages

Make sure to include dev dependencies

$ npm install

Build

$ npm run-script build

Building the Docker image

You need to set the NPM_TOKEN parameter to the NPM token to the private registry.

$ docker build --build-arg NPM_TOKEN="YOURTOKENHERE" .

Test

This project is starting to get improved testability. But it will be a long slog.

$ npm test

Which is equivalent to running:

$ mocha

Contributions welcome

Happy to have contributions, though please consider reviewing the CONTRIBUTING.MD file, the code of conduct, and then also open a work item to help discuss the features or functionality ahead of kicking off any such work.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Implementation Details

Configuration

The configuration story for this application has been evolving over time. At this time, the following configuration elements are available at this time, each with a distinct purpose.

A GitHub organization(s) configuration file in JSON format is required as of version 4.2.0 of the app.

• Environment Variables (see configuration.js for details)
• JSON Files (either committed directly to a repo or overwritten during deployment)
  • config/resources.json: categories, links and special resources to light up learning resources
  • config/organizations.json: organization configuration information, an alternate and additive way to include organization config in the app at deployment time. For this method to work, make sure to set the configuration environment to use from such a file using the CONFIGURATION_ENVIRONMENT env variable.
• Azure Key Vault secrets

With the current configuration story, a CONFIGURATION_ENVIRONMENT variable is required, as well as a secret for AAD to get KeyVault bootstrapped. That requirement will go away soon.

KeyVault Secret Support

Any configuration string property can be resolved to a KeyVault secret.

To use a stored KeyVault secret, configuration to allow this application's service principal to get the secret value, simply use a custom keyvault:// URI format.

For example, given a key vault named samplevault, setting a configuration parameter to keyvault://samplevault.vault.azure.net/secrets/secret-name/optionalVersion would resolve that secret.

To select a custom user tag for a secret, use the auth parameter of the URI: a value of keyvault://username@samplevault.vault.azure.net/secrets/secret-name would get the secret and its metadata, setting the configuration value to the username tag, if present.

Key rotation

As configuration, including secrets, is resolved at startup, any key rotation would need to include a restart of the app service.

Jobs

Several jobs are available in the container or the jobs/ folder. These can optionally provide useful operational and services support. Often a Kubernetes CronJob can help.

• cleanupInvites: if configured for an org, cleanup old unaccepted invites
• firehose: ongoing processing of GitHub events for keeping cache up-to-date
• managers: cache the last-known manager for links, to use in notifications after a departure may remove someone from the graph
• migrateLinks: a one-time migration script to help when moving link source of truth
• permissions: updating permissions for all-write/all-read/all-admin teams when configured
• refreshUsernames: keeping link data fresh with GitHub username renames, corporate username and display name updates, and removing links for deleted GitHub users who remove their accounts permanently from GitHub.com
• reports: processing the building of report data about use, abandoned repos, etc.

Application Insights

When using Microsoft Application Insights, this library reports a number of metrics, events and dependencies.

Library events include:

• UserUnlink: When a user object is unlinked and dropped

User interface events include:

• PortalUserUnlink: When a person initiates and completes an unlink
• PortalUserLink: When a person links their account
• PortalUserReconnectNeeded: When a user needs to reconnect their GitHub account
• PortalUserReconnected: When a user successfully reconnects their GitHub account when using AAD-first auth

E-mail

A custom mail provider is being used internally, but a more generic mail provider contract exists in the library folder for the app now. This replaces or optionally augments the ability of the app to do workflow over mail. Since Microsoft is an e-mail company and all.

API

Please see the API.md file for information about the early API implementation.

Undocumented / special features

This is meant to start an index of interesting features for operations use.

people

/people search view

• Add a type=former query string parameter to show a current understanding of potential former employees who cannot be found in the directory
• In the type=former view, portal system sudoers will receive a link next to the user to 'manage user', showing more information and the option to remove from the org

repos

/repos search view

• Add a showids=1 query string parameter to have repository IDs show up next to repository names

new repo templates

When a new repository is created, a template directory can be used to pre-populate that repo with any important files such as a standard LICENSE file, README, contribution information, issue templates for GitHub, etc.

See also: config/github.templates.js which exports information from a template data JSON file, as well as determines where those templates live on the file system.

The original location for templates was within the same repo in the data/templates folder; however, you can also use a public or private NPM package that contains the template content.

Static Site Assets

To simplify the app build process, and also make it easier for us to open source a lot of the project without Microsoft-specific assets and content, the site pulls its static assets (favicon, graphics, client scripts) from an NPM package.

Inside the app's package.json, a property can be set, static-site-assets-package-name, pointing to the name of an NPM package (public or private) that contains those assets.

By default, this project contains a default-assets-package sub-folder NPM package with more generic Bootstrap content, Grunt build scripts, etc. It is used if this variable is not defined in the package JSON. Unfortunately you need to separately npm install and grunt to use it, or just point it at your own set of CSS files and other assets. Sorry, its not pretty.

Breaking changes with the TypeScript version

• In-memory session and link providers enable an easier local development experience. As a result, you must configure a link provider type and a session type in settings.
  • SESSION_PROVIDER should be explicitly set to redis

Breaking changes with historical repo metadata

• Prior to late 2017, newly created repos stored metadata that included the org name and repo name requested but not the repo ID of the repo when created. The current implementation tries to use the repo ID as an entity lookup value and so will fail on historical data.

Removed features and functions

• Issue-based approval workflow (backed by GitHub issues) removed for all approvals

Data quality issues

username casing

The original table store for usernames (GitHub users, etc.) was case sensitive for stored data. However, the newer Postgres system uses case insensitive indexes. As a result there may be latent bugs.

date/times

• Approval 'decisionTime' field was buggy in the past
• Approval 'requested' field was buggy in the past

Going forward these fields are ISO8601 date time fields. Existing data may continue to have poor formats, and may be an issue during data migration.

Migration of data

The localEnvironment TypeScript file is intended to permit prototyping and local development hacks.

A job, migrateLinks, is able to move links between providers when proper configuration is in place.

Bare minimum local development environment

If you place a JSON file env.json above the directory of your cloned repo (to prevent committing secrets to your repo by accident or in your editor), you can configure the following extreme minimum working set to use the app.

The central operations token is a personal access token that is a org owner of the GitHub org(s) being managed.

  "DEBUG_ALLOW_HTTP": "1",
  "GITHUB_CENTRAL_OPERATIONS_TOKEN": "a github token for the app",
  "GITHUB_ORGANIZATIONS_FILE": "../../env-orgs.json",
  "GITHUB_CLIENT_ID" : "your client id",
  "GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET" : "your client secret",
  "GITHUB_CALLBACK_URL" : "http://localhost:3000/auth/github/callback",
  "AAD_CLIENT_ID": "your corporate app id",
  "AAD_REDIRECT_URL" : "http://localhost:3000/auth/azure/callback",
  "AAD_CLIENT_SECRET" : "a secret for the corporate app",
  "AAD_TENANT_ID" : "your tenant id",
  "AAD_ISSUER": "https://sts.windows.net/your tenant id/",

In this mode memory providers are used, including a mocked Redis client. Note that this does mean that a large GitHub organization configured with memory providers could become a token use nightmare, as each new execution of the app without a Redis Cache behind the scenes is going to have 100% cache misses for GitHub metadata. Consider configuring a development or local Redis server to keep cached data around.

How the app authenticates with GitHub

The service as a monolith is able to partition keys and authentication for GitHub resources at the organization level.

GitHub org owner Personal Access Token

There is a 'central operations token' supported to make it easy for the simple case. That central token is used if an org does not have a token defined, or in resolving cross-org assets - namely teams by ID and accounts by ID.

In lieu of a central ops token, the first configured organization's token is used in the current design.

Individual orgs can have their own token(s) defined from their own account(s).

Traditional GitHub OAuth app

An OAuth app is used to authenticate the GitHub users. This app needs to be approved as a third-party app in all your GitHub apps currently.

Modern GitHub App

Work in progress: supporting modern GitHub apps. Will require configuring the installation ID for a given organization.

For performance reasons, a partitioned/purpose-intended app model is being designed that will fallback to the one configured app installation, if any. If there is no modern GitHub app, the GitHub PAT for an org will be used.

Feature flags

Under development, configuration values in config/features.json map explicit opt-in environment variables to features and functions for the monolithic site.

This was, organizations can choose which specific features they may want to have exposed by the app.

Most features can be opted in to by simply setting the environment variable value to 1.

• allowUnauthorizedNewRepositoryLockdownSystem

  • Variable: FEATURE_FLAG_ALLOW_UNAUTHORIZED_NEW_REPOSITORY_LOCKDOWN_SYSTEM
  • Purpose: Allows the "unauthorized new repository lockdown system" to be available as an organization feature flag. It does not turn this system on by default in any case.
  • Requirements: the event firehose must be used (there is no equivalent job, to make sure to not accidentially destroy permissions across existing repos)