ProtoDash

ProtoDash is a tool to aid the rapid development of prototype dashboards and enable data engineering and data science to deploy static sites without the need to engage with ops.

Dashboard Config

The config for the dashboards is stored in config.yml and is a map of slugs (the path that the dashboard will serve from) and the config options for that specific dashboard.

A verbose example of the file with all available options is below.

---
dashboard-slug:
  gcs_bucket: my-sandbox-bucket # required
  single_page_app: true # optional
  prefix: sub-dir-in-gcs # optional
  public: true # optional

Key	Description	Default	Required
gcs_bucket	The bucket to serve the files from		yes
single_page_app	Whether the app is an SPA, when this is set to true and a path would return a 404, we serve the root index.html instead	false	no
prefix	A prefix in the bucket to serve from, this would allow you to run multiple apps from the same bucket		no
public	Whether the dashboard should be publicly accessible	false	no
subdomain	Whether the dashboard should serve from a path or a subdomain	false	no

Adding a dashboard

Protodash has access to GCS buckets created in projects in the dataops/sandbox hierarchy: for more information on creating such a project see Creating a Prototype Data Project on Google Cloud Platform.

Once you have a dashboard ready to go, open a PR against config.yml with the required info. After it's approved and merged we auto-deploy the changes and from that point on you can edit the files in your GCS bucket and the changes should be instant.

Local Development

You'll want to set the GOOGLE_CLOUD_CREDENTIALS to point at either the json keyfile for a service account, or your local application default credentials json keyfile (usually ~/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json).

go build -o protodash
./protodash

Environment Config

These environment variables control how ProtoDash operates in production. It should not normally be necessary to modify these.

Env Variable	Description	Default
PROTODASH_LISTEN	Address to bind the server	:8080
PROTODASH_LOG_LEVEL	Logging level	debug
PROTODASH_PROXY_TIMEOUT	Defines the maximum time in serving the proxy requests, this is a hard timeout and includes retries	10s
PROTODASH_CLIENT_TIMEOUT	Hard timeout on requests that protodash sends to the Google Storage API	2s
PROTODASH_IDLE_CONN_TIMEOUT	Maximum duration of idle connections between protodash and the Google Storage API	120s
PROTODASH_MAX_IDLE_CONNS	Maximum number of idle connections to keep open. This doesn't control the maximum number of connections	10
PROTODASH_OAUTH_ENABLED	Toggles whether authentication is on or off	false
PROTODASH_OAUTH_DOMAIN	The OAuth domain that the authentication layer will use, currently only supports Auth0
PROTODASH_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID	Client ID of the OAuth application
PROTODASH_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET	Client Secret of the OAuth application, if not defined use the PKCE flow
PROTODASH_OAUTH_REDIRECT_URI	Callback URI to redirect to after authenticating
PROTODASH_SESSION_SECRET	Secret to usse for encrypting the session cookie
PROTODASH_SHOW_PRIVATE	Whether to show the list of private dashboards if not authenticated	false
PROTODASH_REDIRECT_TO_LOGIN	Whether to redirect to the login pagee if a user is not authenticated and accesses a private dashboard	false
PROTODASH_BASE_DOMAIN	The domain to use when building subdomains and handling redirects	localhost:8080
PROTODASH_DEFAULT_BUCKET	Default GCS bucket to use for dashboards if none is defined in the config
PROTODASH_CONFIG_FILE	Config file for the dashboards	config.yml

Thanks

• nytimes/gcs-helper - Portions of the code here were heavily inspired by the gcs-helper project from the NY Times, particularly the method of proxying requests to GCS without having to use the GCS storage APIs.
• markbates/goth - The core of the authentication / the interfaces we use for the auth are based on those in Goth.