site-creation-backend
Creates Isomer sites from FormSG site creation requests
Overview
Isomer allows users to perform certain administrative tasks themselves, namely:
- Creating a GitHub repository and accompanying Netlify sites
- Add and removing users from their GitHub team, and;
- Setting up of KeyCDN for the website, along with DNS aliases (go-live)
This is done through several FormSG forms managed by the Isomer team.
Users have to verify through e-mail that they are Singapore Government personnel in order to use the forms.
Form submissions are then sent via webhook to site-creation-backend to trigger the appropriate calls to GitHub, Netlify and KeyCDN.
Architecture
This application is built using TypeScript and Express.js; code is currently organised into middleware, controllers and services. Controllers make calls to set-up infrastructure through services.
For each form webhook, we mount two controllers, one for webhook payload decryption
and one to handle the actual request. This is bootstrapped at express.ts.
site-creation-backend has two possible entrypoints:
index.tslaunches a standard Express.js applicationserverless.tsis an adapter for the application into an AWS Lambda function
Development Setup
- Make copies of the forms using your own FormSG account
- Take care to use storage mode
- Use ngrok to expose port 8080 on your local machine as a
https host on ngrok, ie,
npx ngrok https 8080 - Set the webhook of each form to the corresponding path on site-creation-backend on the ngrok host
- Study
config.tsto set the appropriate env vars. Note that site-creation-backend will directly manipulate GitHub, Netlify and KeyCDN. npm run dev
Deployment
This application is deployed into API Gateway and AWS Lambda; each endpoint exposed is handled by a separate lambda function that happens to share the same codebase.
The lambda codebase in turn is the Express.js application wrapped by serverless-http.