There's been some stability issues with our self-hosted
health.openneo.net service lately. I just upgraded to a new version
today, so my hope is that today's weird slowness is that it's doing the
expected GlitchTip 4.0 upgrade data migration process designed to save
disk space, and hopefully it will take care of itself by the end of the
day?
But just to help out, I'm disabling this feature to remove pressure on
the GlitchTip service. We don't actually use performance trace analysis
irl, and so it's just taking up disk space and processing power. If we
end up wanting to dig into something in the future, we can turn it back
on! (My hope had been that a sample rate of 5% was small enough to be a
good hedge to have "enough" data just in case something comes up, but
idk, I don't actually have a great sense of how much pressure even 5%
of our total volume is, and I'd rather just be certain it's out of the
picture altogether, at least while working on this.)
This doesn't connect to anything yet, I'm just doing the beginnings of
loading NC Mall item data!
My intent is to run this regularly to keep our own NC info in the
database too, primarily for use in the Item Getting Guide. (Could be
useful to surface in other places too though!) This will help us split
items into those that can be one-click purchased with the NC Mall
integration, vs NC items that need to be acquired by other means.
TNT requested that we figure out ways to connect the dots between
people's intentions on DTI to their purchases in the NC Mall.
But rather than just slam ad links everywhere, our plan is to design an
actually useful feature about it: the "Item Getting Guide". It'll break
down items by how you can actually get them (NP economy, NC Mall,
retired NC, Dyeworks, etc), and we're planning some cute actions you
can take, like shortcuts for getting them onto trade wishlists or into
your NC Mall cart.
This is just a little demo version of the page, just breaking down
items specified in the URL into NC/NP/PB! Later we'll do more granular
breakdown than this, with more info and actions—and we'll also like,
link to it at all, which isn't the case yet! (The main way we expect
people to get here is by a "Get these items" button we'll add to the
outfit editor, but there might be other paths, too.)
I'm doing some back-and-forth on the contract between me and TNT, and
they proposed this amendment to the copyright text in the Fan Site
Agreement. Implemented now!
Ah right, now that you no longer need to provide this secret value as a
query param or a cookie in order to see NeoPass stuff, we can safely
delete it! Goodbye! 👋
Yay, we got the API endpoint for this! The `linkage` scope is the key.
Rather than pulling back the specific fallback behavior we had wrote
for usernames before, which was slightly different and involved
appending `neopass` in there too (e.g. `matchu-neopass-1234`), I
figured let's just use a lot of the same logic, and just use the
preferred name as the base name. (I figure the `neopass` suffix isn't
that useful anyway, `matchu-1234` kinda looks better tbh! And it's all
fallback stuff that I expect serious users to replace, anyway.)
I'm getting ready to add handling for "what if you don't *have* a
current password*??", so it seems like the right way to do that is to
just eject the controller and start customizing!
Hacky and inconvenient, but it works!
I want this primarily to enable me to live-debug what info we're
getting back in the auth token. In production right now, the flow with
NeoPass succeeds, but we fail to create the account, and my production
error logs say it's because the username field is too long. I had hoped
it would just be the Neopets username, but now that I've poked at
NeoPass itself a bit, I'm realizing it won't be that simple.
So, we'll use this to investigate!
Ahh okay, the NeoPass spec says to pass the `client_id` and
`client_secret` as POST form data when exchanging the code for the
access token, but the default behavior of our client is to pass it as
an `Authorization` header instead.
In this change, we set an option to change that behavior, and also add
a lot of comments about this and the other options!
Wowie, it's starting to happen! :3
When you run this in production, though, you get back the auth failure
message, and the OmniAuth logs say the server returned the following:
> invalid_client: Client authentication failed (e.g., unknown client,
> no client authentication included, or unsupported authentication
> method). The OAuth 2.0 Client supports client authentication method
> 'client_secret_post', but method 'client_secret_basic' was requested.
> You must configure the OAuth 2.0 client's
> 'token_endpoint_auth_method' value to accept 'client_secret_basic'.
I'll add a fix for this in the next commit, with some explanations as
to why!
I don't link to this in the footer or anything yet, but TNT asked for
it as part of the NeoPass setup, so I currently just redirect to the
outdated Impress 2020 privacy policy. (It's outdated in the sense that
we share *less* data with our third party services now, e.g. we moved
our analytics and error tracking onto our own machines!)
Ah right, I went and checked the Devise source code, and the default
implementation for `password_required?` is a bit trickier than I
expected:
```ruby
def password_required?
!persisted? || !password.nil? || !password_confirmation.nil?
end
```
Looks like `super` does a good enough job here, though! (I'm actually
kinda surprised, I wasn't sure how Ruby's `super` rules worked, and
this isn't a subclass thing—or maybe it is, maybe the `devise` method
adds a mixin? Idk! But it does what I expect, so, great!)
So now, we require the password if 1) Devise doesn't see a UI reason
not to, *and* 2) the user isn't using OmniAuth (i.e. NeoPass).
This had caused a bug where it was impossible to use the Settings page
*without* changing your password! (The form says it's okay to leave it
blank, which stopped being true! But now it's fixed!)
Right, I didn't totally connect the dots that there's some OpenID
features in the mix here for how we expect to identify the user once
they authenticate. It requires looking up the provider's public key,
and validating the JWT they sent us. This gem does all that for us!
I don't actually know what a real NeoPass `id_token` looks like yet?
But I'll fill in some placeholder stuff for now, and use that for
initializing the account!
In this change, we wire up a new NeoPass OAuth2 strategy for OmniAuth,
and hook up the "Log in with NeoPass" button to use it!
The authentication currently fails with `invalid_credentials`, and
shows the `owo` response we hardcoded into the NeoPass server's token
response. We need to finally follow up on the little `TODO` written in
there!
If you pass `?neopass=1` (or a secret value in production), you can see
the "Log in with NeoPass" button, which currently takes you to
OmniAuth's "developer" login page, where you can specify a name and
email and be redirected back. (All placeholder UI!)
We're gonna strip the whole developer strategy out pretty fast and
replace it with one that uses our NeoPass test server. This is just me
checking my understanding of the wiring!
This is setting us up for NeoPass, but first we're just gonna try stuff
with the "developer" strategy that's built in for testing, rather than
using the NeoPass dev server!
Turbo expects this to exist, for features we don't use! I didn't bother
to check if Turbo has a way to turn this off too, I just said fine lol
Turbo worked in development without this because it only loads files as
needed, whereas in production it blocked the app from starting up. But
you can see the error in development by running `rails zeitwerk:check`,
which attempts to preload everything to make sure it all works, and you
get this:
```
NameError: uninitialized constant ActionCable (NameError)
class Turbo::StreamsChannel < ActionCable::Channel::Base
```
Fixed now!
Someone requested this in Discord, and I figured why not! I'm still
planning to move stuff away from Impress 2020 over time, I just figure
may as well have them more linked while this is still The Reality
I'm starting to port over the functionality that was previously just,
me running `yarn db:export:public-data` in `impress-2020` and
committing it to Git LFS every time.
My immediate motivation is that the `impress-2020` git repository is
getting weirdly large?? Idk how these 40MB files have blown up to a
solid 16GB of Git LFS data (we don't have THAT many!!!), but I guess
there's something about Git LFS's architecture and disk usage that I'm
not understanding.
So, let's move to a simpler system in which we don't bind the public
data to the codebase, but instead just regularly dump it in production
and make it available for download.
This change adds the `rails public_data:commit` task, which when run in
production will make the latest available at
`https://impress.openneo.net/public-data/latest.sql.gz`, and will also
store a running log of previous dumps, viewable at
`https://impress.openneo.net/public-data/`.
Things left to do:
1. Create a `rails public_data:pull` task, to download `latest.sql.gz`
and import it into the local development database.
2. Set up a cron job to dump this out regularly, idk maybe weekly? That
will grow, but not very fast (about 2GB per year), and we can add
logic to rotate out old ones if it starts to grow too far. (If we
wanted to get really intricate, we could do like, daily for the past
week, then weekly for the past 3 months, then monthly for the past
year, idk. There must be tools that do this!)
A few pieces here:
1. Convert all tables to `utf8mb4`+`utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci` strings.
2. Configure that as the server's default.
3. Configure the Rails database connection to use this encoding too.
Came together pretty well, whew! This has been a LONG time coming,
`latin1` is NOT a good charset for the year 2024!
Trying something new and lightweight and more data-controlled!
I also turned down the sample rate for the performance traces feature,
because we hardly use it right now, and Sentry is always getting mad at
us for vastly exceeding our free plan quota—and like, we're not on
Sentry anymore so I imagine we have more wiggle room with that, but I
figure let's turn down the volume anyway, until we decide we want it.
Previously, passing in `fits:blue` would cause a crash, because
`species_name` part of the split would be `nil`, oops!
In this change, we use a regex for more explicitness about the pattern
we're trying to match. We'll also add more cases next! (You'll note the
error message mentions `fits:nostalgic-faerie-draik`, which isn't
actually possible yet, but will be!)
I built this API endpoint in anticipation of a change I never actually
made! I'll just remove it for now, leaning toward cleanuppery over
holding onto something I'm not sure about.
The Neopets Media Archive is a service that mirrors `images.neopets.com`
over time! Right now we're starting by just loading manifests, and
using them to replace the hacks we used for determining the Alt Style
PNG and SVG URLs; but with time, I want to load *all* customization
media files, to have our own secondary file source that isn't dependent
on Neopets to always be up.
Impress 2020 already caches manifest files, but this strategy is
different in two ways:
1. We're using the filesystem rather than a database column. (That is,
manifest data is kinda duplicated in the system right now!) This is
because I intend to go in a more file-y way long-term anyway, to
load more than just the manifests.
2. Impress 2020 guesses at the manifest URLs by pattern, and reloads
them on a regular basis. Instead, we use the modeling system: when
TNT changes the URL of a manifest by appending a new `?v=` query
string to it, this system will consider it a new URL, and will load
the new copy accordingly.
Fun fact, I actually have been prototyping some of this stuff in a side
project I'd named `impress-media-server`! It's a little Sinatra app
that indeed *does* save all the files needed for customization, and can
generate lightweight lil preview iframes and images pretty easily. I
had initially been planning this as a separate service, but after
thinking over the arch a bit, I think it'll go smoother to just give
the main app all the same access and awareness—and I wrote it all in
Ruby and plain HTML/JS/CSS, so it should be pretty easy to port over
bit-by-bit!
Anyway, only Alt Styles use this for now, but my motivation is to be
able to use more-correct asset URL logic to be able to finally swap
over wardrobe-2020's item search to impress.openneo.net's item search
API endpoint—which will get "Items You Own" searches working again, and
whittle down one of the last big things Impress 2020 can do that the
main app can't. Let's see how it goes!
I've moved the support secret into the encrypted credentials file, and
moved the origin into a top-level custom config value in the
environment files, with different defaults per environment but still
the ability to override it. (I don't use this, but it feels polite to
not actually *demand* that people use port 4000, y'know?)
There's a bit happening behind the scenes of this change. Previously,
we kept a `SECRET_TOKEN` environment variable in `production.env`, and
used a `secret_token.rb` initializer to wire it up as the
`secret_key_base`.
In this change, we move to Rails's new-ish (two years old :p) encrypted
credentials system. Now, we set a `RAILS_MASTER_KEY` environment
variable in the deployed `production.env` instead (and in our local
`.env.production` in the project root for managing it), and we can run
`rails credentials:edit` to open the encrypted file in a text editor.
Inside, the content is just:
```yml
secret_key_base: "<OUR_SECRET_KEY>"
```
This indirection doesn't exactly do much for us functionally; it's just
the more standard way of achieving what our `secret_token.rb` situation
was achieving.
We could also migrate other secrets into there, and I just might! That
would simplify duplication between `/deploy/files/production.env` and
`/.env.production`, at any rate! The main notable one is
`MATCHU_EMAIL_PASSWORD` for sending auth emails from
`matchu@openneo.net` (and there's also a Stripe token that we don't
actually use in the app these days, those codepaths are old bones). Oh
and there's also the `IMPRESS_2020_SUPPORT_SECRET`!
Anyway, the motivation for this was to remove the warning when starting
the app that Devise is trying to use the deprecated
`Rails.application.secrets` method. I was expecting to have to do
[the workaround shared here](https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/issues/5644#issuecomment-1804626431),
but it turns out whatever default behavior Devise does under the hood
is happy enough with our new decision to use the credentials file, and
the deprecation warning is gone! Ok neat!
Mostly this is just me testing out what it would look like to
modularize the app more… I've noticed that some concerns, like
fundraising, are just not relevant to most of the app, and being able
to lock them away inside subfolders feels like it'll help tidy up
long folder lists.
Notably, I haven't touched the models case yet, because I worry that
might be a bit more complex, whereas everything else seems pretty
well-isolated? We'll try it out!
I'm not really using this lately, and it _only_ creates vulnerability
surface area when not in use; so, while I'm pretty sure we locked this
down correctly to only admin accounts, I'm disabling it just as good
practice. We can add this back later if we need it again!
A little architecture trick here! DTI 2020 authorizes support staff
requests by means of a secret token, instead of user account stuff. And
our support tools still all call DTI 2020 APIs.
So here, we bridge the gap: we copy DTI 2020's support secret to this
app's environment variables (I needed to update
`deploy/files/production.env` and run `bin/deploy:setup` for this!),
then users with the new `support_secret` flag have it added to their
HTML documents in the meta tags. Then, the JS reads the meta tag.
I also fixed an issue in the `deploy/setup.yml` playbook, where I had
temporarily commented some stuff out to skip steps one time, and forgot
to uncomment them after oops lol!
To activate this, I created a `.env.development` file in my project
root, with the following content:
```env
IMPRESS_2020_ORIGIN=http://localhost:4000
```
Then, I started impress-2020 with `yarn dev --port=4000`.
Now, the app loads from there, hooray!! It even fixes that obnoxious
pet state ID bug that happens when you run against the production db lol
Been wanting this for a while in theory, gonna actually do it now!
The motivation is that I want to turn up the timeout for loading pets,
because the Neopets endpoints are slower today with the NC UC release -
but I can already predict that under our current architecture that will
be a problem, because it'll block up our request queue!
Falcon uses Ruby's relatively-new async system to *not* have requests
block on upstream requests, and my understanding is that this behavior
is plug-and-play. Let's see how it goes!
Emi Matchu