Once mature enough, this will be the backend of our solution to manage the mate & drinks supply of our Hackerspace. As such, there are two principles that must be prioritized when making design decisions that affect the way users interact with the system:
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It must be easy.
If you just want to drink some mate, you usually don't want to RTFM first. Therefore, using the whole system must be intuitive, and not require another person explaining it first.
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It must be fast.
The purpose of this system lays in enabling users to grab a cold drink, and not in wasting their time. So the steps that are necessary to make a transaction must be reduced to a minimum. By giving users a variety of authentication options, they can choose for themselves what gives "good enough" security and a fast user experience.
This backend depends on several other services, that should be configured alongside with this application. Not all are strictly required, but some functions might not work if a service is configured improperly.
go-drink can either be used with Postgresql as a database backend, or sqlite. If no database backend is configured, an in-memory sqlite database is used. However, if a backend is configured, but it is unreachable during the application startup, go-drink terminates instantly.
| Environment Variable | Example Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GODRINK_DBDRIVER | postgres |
The database backend to use. May either be postgres or sqlite. |
| GODRINK_DB | postgresql://godrink:changeme@db:5432/godrink?sslmode=disable |
A connection string describing of the database can be reached |
An SMTP server can be configured, so that the application can send out emails to users, for example if a password reset is requested. If the SMTP configuration is omitted, or contains invalid data, a warning is logged, but the application functions otherwise normally.
| Environment Variable | Example Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GODRINK_SMTPHOST | yourmailhost.example:465 |
The address of the SMTP Server, in the format : |
| GODRINK_SMTPUSER | [email protected] |
The username that should be used to authenticate to the server |
| GODRINK_SMTPPASS | changeme |
The corresponding password for the user. |
| GODRINK_SMTPFROM | [email protected] |
The address that is used in the From header header when sending out emails. If omitted, the value of GODRINK_SMTPUSER is used. |
A note on TLS: Currently, the application expects that it can open a TLS encrypted connection to the target port. STARTTLS or plaintext communication is not supported at the moment.
If your frontend runs under a different origin than the backend, you can add this origin to the CORS header via the
following environment variable. If the value remains unconfigured, the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header is never set.
| Environment Variable | Example Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GODRINK_CORS | http://localhost:8081 |
The value is directly passed along into the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. If a value is set here, the Access-Control-Allow-Credentials header will be set as well. |