Coveralls stopped working back in July when we reached build number 3790
because back when we used Travis we created builds from numbers 3791 to
35700.
After trying to change the numbers in several ways, all of them
resulting in a "No build matching CI build number" message, we're trying
the Github Action provided by Coveralls instead. In order to make it
work, we need to add the `simplecov-lcov` gem and generate the report at
`coverage/lcov.info`. Note that, for some reason, `simplecov-lcov`
doesn't seem to depend on `simplecov` and we need `simplecov` 0.18 or
later, so we're manually adding this dependency as well.
We were assigning variants in a controller, in the context of a request.
However, when sending emails, there is no request and no controller is
involved, so we also need to set the variant in the ApplicationMailer
class.
Sometimes it might be convenient to use completely different views for
different tenants. For example, a certain tenant might use a footer that
has nothing to do with the default one.
For these cases, instead of adding `case Tenant.current_schema`
conditions to the view, it might be tidier to use a different file.
For this purpose, we're using Rails variants [1], which means that a
tenant named `mytenant` will use a template ending with
`.html+mytenant.erb` if it's available.
This works with components too, but has a limitation: when using the
`custom/` folder to add ERB files for a tenant, the default tenant ERB
file needs to be added to the `custom/` folder as well; if there aren't
changes to this file, a symbolic link will do.
For example, if we're writing a custom `admin/action_component` view for
the tenant `milky-way` but don't need to change this file for the
default tenant:
1. Create `app/components/custom/admin/action_component.rb` according to
the components customizations documentation [2]
2. Create the custom view for the `milky-way` tenant and save it under
`app/components/custom/admin/action_component.html+milky-way.erb`
3. Enter the `app/components/custom/admin/` folder and run `ln -s
../../admin/action_component.html.erb`
We're also adding some controller tests. Since Rails doesn't load the
middleware during controller tests, we're stubbing the `current_schema`
method directly instead of changing the subdomain of the request.
[1] https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v6.0/layouts_and_rendering.html#the-variants-option
[2] https://docs.consulproject.org/docs/english-documentation/customization/components
ViewComponent 2.78.0 adds support for variants with dashes and dots in
their names; since we're going to add variants named after a subdomain,
we need this feature.
This way we'll avoid having all tenant organizations named "CONSUL" by
default, and we'll also use different email senders per tenant, which
will reduce the change of the emails being marked as spam.
We were using `consul.dev` as default, which might be fine for the
development environment, but it's something that definitely needs to be
changed on production.
Now we're providing a better default setting: using the same domain
which is used to generate URLs in emails. This also makes it easier to
configure new tenants, since the setting will default to whatever host
the new tenant is using.
The `|| "consul.dev"` part might not be needed; I'm keeping it because
I'm not sure production environents would not experience any new issues
if we don't add it, but we might remove it in the future.
One of these tests has failed once because there wasn't a user with the
right confirmation token. While I haven't been able to reproduce the
issue, there's a chance it's caused by a `visit` call to the
confirmation path which might start before the redirect request to the
successful sign up page has finished.
I'm not sure this is the case, though, but, worst case scenario, if the
test fails again we'll know it isn't because of a missing expectation.
When voting investment projects, the sidebar was rendered without the
`@heading_content_blocks` being set. That resulted in a 500 error when
the heading had content blocks.
By extracting the logic to a component, we make sure the heading content
blocks are properly set every time this code is rendered, no matter
which controller is rendering the view.
We were already doing the same for the main header color; now we also
make it easier to use different top links, subnavigation and footer
colors per tenant.
Just like we do with SCSS variables, we use the brand-secondary color
for the top links when the `--top-links` variable isn't defined.
Just like we did with SCSS variables, we use the `--main-header` CSS
variable and, if it isn't defined, we use the `--brand` CSS variable
instead.
Note that we're still using the `inverted-selection` mixin based on the
default `$main-header` color, so it's possible that we get the inverted
selection in the main header when using a dark color with `$main-header`
but a light color with `--main-header`, which doesn't make much sense.
Not sure whether there's anything we can do about it.
Until now, overwriting the styles for a certain tenant was a very
tedious task. For example, if we wanted to use a different brand color
for a tenant, we had to manually overwrite the styles for every element
using that color.
It isn't possible to use different SCSS variables per tenant unless we
generate a different stylesheet per tenant. However, doing so would make
the CSS compilation take way too long on installations with more than a
couple of tenants, and it wouldn't allow to get the colors dynamically
from the database, which we intend to support in the future.
So we're using CSS variables instead. These variables are supported by
97% of the browsers (as of October 2022), and for the other 3% of the
browsers we're using the default colors (SCSS variables) instead.
CSS variables have some limitations: for instance, it isn't possible to
use functions like `lighten`, `darken` or `scale-color` with CSS
variables, so the application might behave in a strange way when we use
these functions.
It also isn't possible to automatically get whether black or white text
makes a better contrast with a certain background color. To overcome
this limitation, we're providing variables ending with `-contrast`. For
instance, since the default `$brand` color is a dark one, when assigning
a light color to `--brand`, we probably want to assign
`--brand-contrast: #{$black}` as well, so the text is still readable.
Until now, we didn't have specific variables for the headers and were
using the brand colors instead. Now we maintain the brand colors as
default values, but allow overwriting them.
For the navigation and footer, we didn't even have variables.
Back in commit 5dbd69486, I said:
> I'm choosing to use the same color for solid and hollow buttons
> because these elements are usually isolated and so from the UX
> perspective they are similar; links, on the other hand, are often in
> the middle of some text.
However, I made a mistake. The crucial factor is that solid buttons
might have a light background if we choose the brand color to be a light
one, and in this case they automatically get black text. However, hollow
buttons always have a light background and so we can't use a light color
for the text and border of these buttons.
This is something we had read about a long time ago, but didn't find how
to reproduce the issue until now.
As mentioned in the Apartment documentation:
> it's important to consider that you may want to maintain the
> "selected" tenant through different parts of the Rack application
> stack. For example, the Devise gem adds the Warden::Manager middleware
> at the end of the stack in the examples above, our
> Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain middleware would come after it.
> Trouble is, Apartment resets the selected tenant after the request is
> finished, so some redirects (e.g. authentication) in Devise will be
> run in the context of the "public" tenant. The same issue would also
> effect a gem such as the better_errors gem which inserts a middleware
> quite early in the Rails middleware stack.
>
> To resolve this issue, consider adding the Apartment middleware at a
> location in the Rack stack that makes sense for your needs, e.g.:
>
> Rails.application.config.middleware.insert_before Warden::Manager,
> Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain
>
> Now work done in the Warden middleware is wrapped in the
> Apartment::Tenant.switch context started in the Generic elevator.
Note this only affects images which can also be customized using the
administration interface; other images like `avatar_admin.png` must be
the same for all tenants. I think this is good enough for now, since the
images that can't be different are the images that aren't customized
that often, and if there's a need to use different images in a certain
CONSUL installation, it can be achieved by changing the code which
renders that image so it uses `image_path_for`.
We were using the same logic in many different places, so we're
simplifying the code. I'm not convinced about the method names, though,
so we might change them in the future.
Note using this method for the default tenant in the `TenantDiskService`
class resulted in a `//` in the path, which is probably harmless but
very ugly and it also generates a different key than the one we got
until now. I've added an extra test to make sure that isn't the case.
We're using the "tenants" subfolder for consistency with the folder
structure we use in ActiveStorage and because some CONSUL installations
might have folders inside the `data` folder which might conflict with
the folders created by tenants.
Note that the Python scripts have a lot of duplication, meaning we need
to change all of them. I'm not refactoring them because I'm not familiar
enough with these scripts (or with Python, for that matter).
Also note that the scripts folder is still shared by all tenants,
meaning it isn't possible to have different scripts for different
tenants. I'm not sure how this situation should be handled; again, I'm
not familiar enough with this feature.
On my machine, seeding a tenant takes about one second, so skipping this
action when it isn't necessary makes tests creating tenants faster
(although creating a tenant still takes about 3-4 seconds on my
machine).
Note we don't need to update the tests; the tests themselves help us
confirm that `Rails.application.secrets` and `Tenant.current_secrets`
return the same object on single-tenant applications.
Right now this is configured using the `secrets.yml` file, which is the
file we've used in the past to configure SMTP settings.
Note that, in the `current_secrets` method, the `if default?` condition
is there so in single-tenant applications it returns the exact same
object as `Rails.application.secrets`, and it makes it immediately clear
for developers reading the code. We're also caching the tenant secrets
(using `||=`) so they behave the same way as Rails secrets; for this to
work properly 100% of the time (for example, in tests) we need to expire
these cached secrets whenever the Rails secrets change.
A similar `unless Tenant.default?` condition is present in the
ApplicationMailer because there's a chance some CONSUL installations
might not be using secrets to define the SMTP settings(they might be
using environment variables, for example) and so in this case we don't
want to force settings based on the secrets.yml file because it would
break the application.
The structure of the SMTP settings in the secrets file should be:
```
production:
tenants:
name_of_the_tenant_subdomain:
smtp_settings:
address:
(...)
```
This way it will be possible to write CSS and JavaScript code that will
only apply to specific tenants.
Note that CSS customization is still limited because it isn't possible
to use different SCSS variables per tenant.
We forgot to do so in commit d827768c0. In order to avoid the same
mistake in the future, we're extracting a method to get these
attributes. We're also adding tests, since we didn't have any tests to
check that the `dir` attribute was properly set.
While this is not strictly necessary, it can help moving the data of one
tenant to a different server or removing it.
Note we're using subfolders inside the `tenants` subfolder. If we simply
used subfolders with the schema names, if the schema names were, for
instance, language codes like `es`, `en`, `it`, ... they would conflict
with the default subfolders used by Active Storage.
Note we aren't allowing to delete a tenant because it would delete all
its data, so this action is a very dangerous one. We might need to add a
warning when creating a tenant, indicating the tenant cannot be
destroyed. We can also add an action to delete a tenant which forces the
admin to write the name of the tenant before deleting it and with a big
warning about the danger of this operation.
For now, we're letting administrators of the "main" (default) tenant to
create other tenants. However, we're only allowing to manage tenants
when the multitenancy configuration option is enabled. This way the
interface won't get in the way on single-tenant applications.
We've thought about creating a new role to manage tenants or a new URL
out of the admin area. We aren't doing so for simplicity purposes and
because we want to keep CONSUL working the same way it has for
single-tenant installations, but we might change it in the future.
There's also the fact that by default we create one user with a known
password, and if by default we create a new role and a new user to
handle tenants, the chances of people forgetting to change the password
of one of these users increases dramatically, particularly if they
aren't using multitenancy.
We had some of the logic in the ApplicationMailer. Since we're going to
use this logic in more places, we're moving it to the Tenant model,
which is the model handling everything related to hosts.
While we ping some search engines (currently, only Google) when
generating the sitemap files, we weren't telling search engines
accessing through the `robots.txt` file where to find the sitemap. Now
we're doing so, using the right sitemap file for the right tenant.
Note that the `sitemap:refresh` task only pings search engines at the
end, so it only does so for the `Sitemap.default_host` defined last. So
we're using the `sitemap:refresh:no_ping` task instead and pinging
search engines after creating each sitemap.
Note we're pinging search engines in staging and preproduction
environments. I'm leaving it that way because that's what we've done
until now, but I wonder whether we should only do so on production.
Since we're creating a new method to get the current url_options, we're
also using it in the dev_seeds.
