1. Table of contents
2. For administrators
3. Maintaining the webapp

Maintaining the RED FLAGS webapp

Running the webapp

The Red Flags web application is also a stand-alone JAR file (just like the engine), which includes an embedded Tomcat application server. You can simply start it by the following command:

$ java -jar redflags-web-VERSION.jar

By default, it runs on port 8080, but you can override it amongst other configuration parameters.

Because the webapp will not exit, it makes sense to launch it using screen, or with nohup in the background:

$ nohup java -jar redflags-web-VERSION.jar &>redflags-web.out &

If you need to stop the webapp, find out it's process ID first. You can do it with ps:

$  ps ax | grep redflags-web | grep java

Or you can check it in the output of the webapp, its logger prints the PID in every line.

When you have the PID, you can use kill to terminate the process.

Configuring the webapp

The Red Flags webapp is built on top of the same framework as the engine, so configuration methods are the same.

The configuration properties for the webapp are:

Property	Type	Description	Default value
server.port	Integer	The port number where the webapp will run	8080
redflags.from	String	The email address to be used as sender	noreply@redflags.eu
redflags.contact	String	Contact email address to be added in emails	zsolt.juranyi@petabyte-research.org
redflags.url	String	The base URL to be used in links in emails	http://www.redflags.eu
redflags.triggerSecret	String	A passphrase for the subscription trigger (see below)	(no default value, you must specify)
dbhost	String	Location of your MySQL server (with port number)	(no default value)
dbname	String	Name of the database schema	(no default value)
dbuser	String	Database user	(no default value)
dbpass	String	Password for database user	(no default value)
spring.mail.host	String	Mail server host	localhost
spring.mail.port	Integer	Mail server port	25

Other properties for mailing are available here.

A typical application.yml will look like this:

server:
    port:                      8080
redflags:
    from:                      noreply@your-domain.tld
    contact:                   somebody@your-company.tld
    url:                       http://www.your-domain.tld
    triggerSecret:             secret2
dbhost:                        localhost:3306
dbname:                        redflags
dbuser:                        redflags
dbpass:                        secret

Setting up Apache

If you are already using an Apache web server to handle web requests, you need to configure it to redirect specific request to the Red Flags webapp. To achieve this, you need to set up a virtual host with reverse proxy, like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        ServerName      yourdomain.tld
        ServerAlias www.yourdomain.tld

        ProxyPass        /files/ !
        ProxyPass        /       http://www.yourdomain.tld:8080/
        ProxyPassReverse /       http://www.yourdomain.tld:8080/

        DocumentRoot /var/www/yourdomain.tld/www/htdocs/

        ErrorDocument 503 /files/maintenance.html
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/yourdomain.tld/www/htdocs/>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog  /var/www/yourdomain.tld/www/logs/error.log
        CustomLog /var/www/yourdomain.tld/www/logs/access.log combined
        ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

And then you can place a maintanenance page and other files to be served directly by Apache under this directory:

/var/www/yourdomain.tld/www/htdocs/files

Triggering subscription emails

To send the subscription emails, the webapp should be triggered from outside, by another program or by the administrator. It is because the sending must be done after the daily processing, which is the engine's task. In the Red Flags system, the triggering is done by the cron script.

To trigger the sending, a HTTP GET request must be sent to the following URL:

http://yourdomain.tld/send-filter-emails?secret=TRIGGER_SECRET

where TRIGGER_SECRET is the value of redflags.triggerSecret configuration property.

You can do it by curl or you can use wget too:

$ wget -qO- http://yourdomain.tld/send-filter-emails?secret=TRIGGER_SECRET

The response will be a true or false value which indicates whether the sending was successful or not. If you provide an invalid secret, the result will be false of course.

User account management

If a newly registered user runs out of the 24 hour activation period, he/she may ask for manual activation. This can be done by running the following SQL command on the Red Flags database:

update rfwl_users set active = 1 where email_address = 'users@email.address';

Inactivation can be done by the same procedure but with replacing 1 with 0.

In case a user requests the removal of their data, the following script will do that:

set @user_email = 'users@email.address';
delete from persistent_logins where username      =  @user_email;
delete from rfwl_userfilters  where user_id       in (select id from rfwl_users where email_address = @user_email);
delete from rfwl_users        where email_address =  @user_email;