Court Case Service

Service to access court cases imported from HMCTS Libra and Common Platform court lists

For more informations, check our Runbook

Quick Start

This section contains the bare minimum you need to do to get the app running against the dev environment assuming you've got all the necessary dependencies (see Prerequisites section).

Run docker-compose up postgres to start the postgres database Docker container
Run ./gradlew clean build to build the application
To run against dev services (you will need to substitute in valid credentials, ask a maintainer for help obtaining these):
- SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev
- COMMUNITY_API_CLIENT_ID=<?>
- COMMUNITY_API_CLIENT_SECRET=<?>
- OFFENDER_ASSESSMENTS_API_CLIENT_ID=<?>
- OFFENDER_ASSESSMENTS_API_CLIENT_SECRET=<?>
And then run./gradlew bootRun
Application will now be running on port 8080
Optional: Run ./gradlew installGitHooks to install Git hooks from ./hooks directory. Note these require postgres to be running to pass.

Running Service Locally

Ensure all docker containers are up and running:

$ docker compose up -d

Which should start the following containers: (verify with $ docker ps if necessary)

oauth
court-case-service-postgres-1
localstack-court-case-service
community-api
offender-assessment-api

Start the service ensuring the local spring boot profile is set:

$ ./gradlew bootRun --args='--spring.profiles.active=local'

NB. All REST endpoints are secured with the role PREPARE_A_CASE which will need to be passed to the endpoint as an OAuth token.

Running on Apple Silicon

When running the service through IntelliJ you may see the following error in the server logs:

Suppressed: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no netty_resolver_dns_native_macos_aarch_64 in java.library.path:

The service will still run in spite of this, and if need be this error can be mitigated with the followng addition in the build.gradle :

    implementation("io.netty:netty-resolver-dns-native-macos:4.1.75.Final") {
        artifact {
            classifier = "osx-aarch_64"
        }
    }

Prerequisites

Java 14
Docker

We also use:

jenv - If you have multiple versions of java locally
kubectl,minikube,helm - For testing and managing k8s deployments
circleci cli - For validating the circle configs
snyk cli - For vulnerability checking

API

The following actuator endpoints are available:

Application health : $ curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/health
Application info : $ curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/info
Application Ping : $ curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/ping
Application Feature Flags : $ curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/feature-flags

Database

The application uses a Postgres 11 database which is managed by Flyway. The SpringBoot integration will automatically manage migrations, so we only need these commands for debugging or if the local database has become corrupted.

Clean schema : $ ./gradlew flywayClean
View details and status information about all migrations : $ ./gradlew flywayInfo

Known issues

ERROR: function uuid_generate_v4() does not exist

Run DROP EXTENSION "uuid-ossp"; in the database. This shouldn't happen given the IF NOT EXISTS in the offending migration but unfortunately there appears to be an issue with Postgres. It seems to be that this issue only occurs when the migration is run against a Postgres instance against which the migration has already been run at some point in the past - even if the schema has been subsequently deleted or if it was created under a different schema name. This is why it only usually happens in transient environments where schemas are often set up and torn down without destroying the underlying database.

Deployment

Builds and deployments are setup in Circle CI and configured in the config file. Helm is used to deploy the service to a Kubernetes Cluster using templates in the helm_deploy folder.

PACT

The service implements both consumer and provider contract tests using PACT. As a provider, it verifies the consumer PACTs generated by prepare-a-case and court-case-matcher. It also generates PACT contracts which define the interactions it expects as a consumer of the community-api.

Consumer

To run build which generates and published the consumer PACTs to the broker, the following environment variables are required

PACTBROKER_AUTH_PASSWORD PACTBROKER_AUTH_USERNAME PACTBROKER_URL

The PACTs can be generated and published, tagged with "main" with the following command

PACTCONSUMER_VERSION=main ./gradlew -Dpact.writer.overwrite=true test pactPublish

Caching

The case list page is cacheable and returns a Last-Modified header for cache validation. There is an nginx docker container configured to do this in ./nginx/Dockerfile.

To build and run the nginx cache against a local instance of court-case-service running on port 8090:

docker build ./nginx --tag court-case-service-proxy
docker run -p 8080:8080 --env SERVICE_HOST=http://host.docker.internal:8090 court-case-service-proxy

This will act as a simple reverse proxy with caching. It is configured to return an X-Cache-Status header which indicates whether the response was retrieved from the cache.