Topcoder Challenge Autopilot

Proof of concept application that processes schedule phases updates.

Configuration

AUTH0_URL: AUTH0 URL, used to get M2M token
AUTH0_PROXY_SERVER_URL: AUTH0 proxy server URL, used to get M2M token
AUTH0_AUDIENCE: AUTH0 audience, used to get M2M token
TOKEN_CACHE_TIME: AUTH0 token cache time, used to get M2M token
AUTH0_CLIENT_ID: AUTH0 client id, used to get M2M token
AUTH0_CLIENT_SECRET: AUTH0 client secret, used to get M2M token
CHALLENGES_TABLE: the name of the challenges table
SUBMISSION_REVIEWS_TABLE: the name of the review table
SUBMISSIONS_TABLE: the name of the submission table
CREATE_CLOUDTRAIL: should be set to true unless CloudTrail is already set up in the account
SCHEDULE_API_URL: the url of the schedule api
CHALLENGE_API_URL: the url of the challenge api
SUBMISSIONS_API_URL: the url of the submissions api *Note, _All these are set via the environment variables.

Install and deploy

Make sure to use Node v12+ by command node -v. We recommend using NVM to quickly switch to the right version:
```
nvm use
```
Requires Serverless Framework CLI to be installed. Credentials for your AWS account will also need to be configured.

In the challenge-autopilot root directory create .env file with the next environment variables. Values for Auth0 config should be shared with you on the forum.

# Auth0 config
AUTH0_URL=
AUTH0_PROXY_SERVER_URL=
AUTH0_AUDIENCE=
TOKEN_CACHE_TIME=
AUTH0_CLIENT_ID=
AUTH0_CLIENT_SECRET=

# Depending services
CHALLENGES_TABLE=
SUBMISSION_REVIEWS_TABLE=
SUBMISSIONS_TABLE=
CREATE_CLOUDTRAIL=

# Depending services
SCHEDULE_API_URL=https://api.topcoder-dev.com/v5/schedules
CHALLENGE_API_URL=https://api.topcoder-dev.com/v5/challenges
SUBMISSIONS_API_URL=https://api.topcoder-dev.com/v5/submissions

⚠️ Never commit this file or its copy to the repository!

Install dependencies:
- npm install
Deploy to AWS:
- serverless deploy

Verification

Preparing a challenge for the schedule phase function

In development environment, find a challenge whose status is Active and pureV5Task is true. Or you can create one by the challenge API.
Create a scheduled phase for this challenge. *Note, _A postman collection is provided for above tasks.

Verifying the event call from the aws console

Open the aws lambda console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/lambda/home?region=us-east-1
Select the function that is deployed. Then select Test tab. And paste below content:

{
  "detail": {
    "newImage": {
      "id": "1305bb63-66bb-418c-b5e0-19cae242c5bf"
    }
  },
  "detail-type": "MODIFY"
}

*Note, _The "id" is the challenge id in above step.

Click the Test button and wait for the result. You can refer to the video attached for details.

Locating an error

EventBridge triggered Lambda

A Lambda function that is producing errors will appear with a red or orange ring in the Service Map. You can click on it and click View Traces to see what the issue is.
Clicking on the trace that has an error allows you to view the subsections and logs for the invocation.
Errors that are thrown might include a stack trace which allows you to locate the point in the code that is causing the issue.

Diagnosing unexpected behaviour

It can be more difficult to diagnose a service that is not behaving as expected, but is not throwing any errors.
In the first instance, you should wait a few minutes as sometimes EventBridge events are not sent immediately.
It might also be a temporary error - EventBridge will retry most events in this case, which can be seen within the trace.
The next step is to locate the Lambda that is causing the issue. A good place to start is sorting the traces by timestamp and looking at the latest ones.
The Lambda functions are configured to log helpful information including the details of the event that triggered them and any DynamoDB requests they make.
This should give some insight into the operations being performed by the function and where the issue might be.

Common issues

Remove deployment

When you are finished, you can remove all of the provisioned resources from your AWS account by running:
- serverless remove
- If there are objects remaining in the S3 buckets, these will need to manually be removed before the bucket can be deleted.

Environment variables

See the Configuration section.

Project structure

/docs - Postman files
/handlers
- /events
  - *.js - Lambda function handlers for EventBridge events
serverless.yml - Main Serverless Framework configuration file

Notes

CloudTrail only supports sending events directly to the default bus in EventBridge.
DynamoDB does not support sending events directly to EventBridge.
- As a solution, the DynamoDB to EventBridge plugin is used here, which uses DynamoDB Streams to trigger a Lambda that forwards events to EventBridge.
- An alternative would be to send an EventBridge custom event after writing to the database.
To remove the serverless.yml lint errors in VS Code, install vscode-cfn-lint extension.

yoution/challenge-autopilot