codidact / core

The core Codidact Q&A software implementation

The core Codidact Q&A software implementation.

Huh?

Codidact is community-driven Q&A software: created, maintained, used, and run by the community, for the community. There's no money-making company behind this.

We're currently in the early stages of development, but once we have a working MVP, we'll be hosting a public Codidact instance for everyone to use. The software will also be available to download and run yourself to host your instance under your own rules.

Installation

There are install instructions for Windows and Linux.

License

AGPL v3.0.

Contributions

Very welcome! Please read our contributing guidelines before you start writing code.

core's Issues

Create API to communicate with Auth Project

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
In the auth project upon registration a member has to be created. Thus it needs to signal to the core project to make such a member and return a result if successful so registration can be done.

Describe the solution you'd like
An API project that does the following:

• Makes an authentication with the auth project or vice versa
• A concise API structure that can be easily used (maybe gRPC, see https://github.com/misha130/core/tree/api for an example)

Describe alternatives you've considered
Other than gRPC its easy to create a good old REST API. Problem is with so many microservices for instance a service for imports it might be better to use gRPC.

Missing Migration execution at Runtime

As per c7dd9d8 currently the execution of the migration is execute via a cli command.

Rather than that, this line of code should be added somewhere on start:
dbContext.Database.Migrate()

Exception handling for this should also be implemented since there is no proper connection string.

Add setup instructions for Arch Linux

Current setup instructions point to a Microsoft download of dotnet core for various flavours of linux, which doesn't include Arch Linux. Luckily, packages exist and can be installed by the Arch package manager, pacman

Instructions should be updated to include steps to install on Arch Linux

I have added instructions to readme.md. PR coming.

Create Shared Page Layout

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Create Shared Page layout that will be shared among all the pages.
Header, footer, sidebar.

Describe the solution you'd like
Should be implemented here:
https://github.com/codidact/core/blob/develop/src/WebApp/Pages/Shared/_Layout.cshtml

Implement application work flow

This tasks refers to how in this project data should be queried from.
This flow should be universal and used for all the queries.

It can be:

• CQRS with Mediatr. Basically separating all the requests to commands and queries and creating handles, behaviors with mediatr to handle these.
  Some examples https://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2015/05/05/cqrs-with-mediatr-and-automapper/
• EventSourcing - Having one source for events - https://github.com/oskardudycz/EventSourcing.NetCore
• UseCases - http://www.plainionist.net/Implementing-Clean-Architecture-UseCases/ Which raphaelschmitz did in his https://bitbucket.org/raphaelschmitz/answers/src/master/
• Repository/Service simple structure. CLASSIC DDD

Feel free to add.
(I realize there is no forum thread about this but I feel its too technical to post on the forum)

How will this be different from other Q&A projects?

I ask because for the past few months I've been looking at AskBot, which is used by the LibreOffice Q&A site.

From askbot.com:

Askbot is a free open source Question and Answer (Q&A) forum software written in Django and Python.

And also their documentation starts with:

Askbot is an open source Question and Answer (Q&A) forum project inspired by StackOverflow and YahooAnswers

Finally, AskBot is licensed as GPL3 and their code is on GitHub.

Setup WebUI (MVC) integration tests

All the controllers and each of the actions in each of the controllers should go through an integration test to verify that they are working properly.

Requires:

• A factory to create a server for each test (ASP Core Server) based on the needs of the test
• Since we need to test StatusCodes we should send Http Requests to this newly created server to verify.

Privacy policy page is empty

The privacy policy page is currently empty. I'm currently working on populating the page with the privacy policy from the forum.

Create New Question Page

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Create a page for creating a new question

Describe the solution you'd like
Please refer to:
https://github.com/codidact/feature-development/blob/master/scoped/post/create-post.md
https://github.com/codidact/docs/wiki/Functional-Specification

The user should be able to add tags.
The user should be able to write a title of the question
The user should be able to write a body of a question with a rich editor.

Create Question Details Page

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Create a page that will display a question and its answers with all of the details.

Describe the solution you'd like
Please refer to:
https://github.com/codidact/feature-development/blob/master/scoped/browse/view-question.md
https://github.com/codidact/docs/wiki/Functional-Specification

Create a request for a new question

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The user should have an ability to create new questions in the question after filling out the new question page.
Thus an API for that is needed.

Describe the solution you'd like
Create a repository inside of application project called Questions and create a new question based on the data received from the client.
Validate the request, return errors if not valid.
Should be authorized.

Automatically Collapse Generated Files in GitHub Diffs

It's so annoying to see all the migration stuff in the diffs, apparently this can be configured in the .gitattributes file.

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/github-diff-supression

I'll look into that.

Use submodule for Codesign, don't include the sources.

Currently, a copy of the Codesign implementation sits in src/WebUI/wwwroot/lib/co-design. This should be a submodule, or maybe a subtree worktree?

I'm on it.

Create Questions Page

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Create a page that will display a list of questions.

Describe the solution you'd like
Please refer to:
https://github.com/codidact/feature-development/blob/master/scoped/browse/question-list.md
https://github.com/codidact/docs/wiki/Functional-Specification

Some incorrect packages are referenced.

The infrastructure project references a package that belongs to the ".NET Framework" framework, not to the ".NET Core" framework, namely Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework.

https://github.com/asynts/codidact-core/blob/c1e82e109b8ef0ea67cf94f3a04471660d186878/src/Infrastructure/Infrastructure.csproj#L11

---

In another place the package Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.Abstractions is included, it appears that this package was replaced by a "framework reference" whatever that is. I have not tested that but look dotnet/aspnetcore#6040 for details.

https://github.com/asynts/codidact-core/blob/c1e82e109b8ef0ea67cf94f3a04471660d186878/src/Infrastructure/Infrastructure.csproj#L12

Create a request to display question details

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The question page details should display the questions and all relevant answers.
Thus an API for that is needed.

Describe the solution you'd like
Create a repository inside of application project called Questions and retrieve the necessary question details based on the question id received from the client.
Validate the request, return errors if not valid.
Should be authorized.

Outdated .NETStandard ?

Why are we using ASP.NET 2.1 instead of the newest (3.1) ?

I tried opening Codidact using Mono, and got this error:

Project Codidact.Infrastructure is not compatible with netcoreapp3.1 (.NETCoreApp,Version=v3.1). Project Codidact.Infrastructure supports: netstandard2.1 (.NETStandard,Version=v2.1)

Implement IdentityServer & Identity.NET

As per https://forum.codidact.org/t/what-kind-of-authorization-framework-library-should-we-use/642/7 it has been decided upon IdentityServer/Identity.NET

The following adjustments should be:

• Add IdentityServer and Identity configuration to Startup:

   app.UseAuthentication();
   app.UseIdentityServer();
   app.UseAuthorization();

• Change ApplicationDbContext to inherit IdentityDbContext
• Create an ApplicationUser that inherits IdentityUser
• Add IdentityServer to DI in the infrastructure module:

   services.AddIdentityServer()
        .AddApiAuthorization<ApplicationUser, ApplicationDbContext>();

• Set member id on create/delete/update
• Integration tests for both WebUI/Infrastructure

Move the authentication stuff into it's own repository.

The idea is to run an authentication server (that deals with user passwords, etc.) in it's own process for security reasons.

The authentication stuff — I mean the stuff in src/Auth — should be moved into the authentication repository.

There must be some sort of API between the servers, as far as I know there wasn't a precise decision made yet.

The authentication stuff is mostly separate already, a direct copy won't be possible though, because this server would connect to a different database.

---

I already created my own repository and slowly start moving the stuff over, however, I don't have much time currently and likely won't be able to complete this in a reasonable amount of time.

Typo in project README

Typo in the project README. In the process of creating pull request.

Minor change: Remove magic number from communities database migration file

Modify communities database migration file to use the CommunitiyStatus enum directly, rather than simply a value of 1. Currently in progress.

Forum link on the readme header is incorrect

The current link URL is set to https://codidact.org/forum/, which results in a 404. The correct forum URL should be https://forum.codidact.org/. I'm in the process of submitting a pull request with this change.

Use user secrets.

Currently the connection strings are stored in the appsettings.json files. There is also a built in mechanism to store user secrets.

Essentially, it would look like this:

cd src/WebUI
dotnet user-secrets init
dotnet user-secrets set ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection "Host=localhost;Database=codidact;Username=codidact"

This could also simplify the install instructions in #31.

It's not a must-have but I found that and would like to put it up for debate.

Implement localization

Per the forum thread https://forum.codidact.org/t/please-bake-in-localization-from-the-beginning/605 we should "bake in localization".

Dotnet supports this as part of its framework:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/localization?view=aspnetcore-3.1

Should at least create a Resources file and implement a standard of using it.

Note: Auth project should have this issue too

Installation documentation is out of date

Describe the bug
In windows-instructions.md, it says:

1. Run the following command inside of 'src/WebUI' to install the connection string

dotnet user-secrets set "ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection" "YOUR_CONNECTION_STRING"

but the src/WebUI folder does not exist in the current source tree.

The same problem exists in the Linux setup documentation.

Create Audit Tables for each entity

As per discussion on the forum: https://forum.codidact.org/t/audit-tables-round-2/548/11
each entity in our database should have an additional table to represent its changes and audit.

May want to use the library of Audit.NET https://github.com/thepirat000/Audit.NET/tree/master/src/Audit.EntityFramework

Should be properly represented in the migration as well.

Add instructions for setting up dev environment to README

Created from project card here

The README needs instructions for setup for various operating systems. These instructions will certainly need maintenance as the project evolves.

I'll be performing a from-scratch install on a Windows PC without C# development tools and noting steps as I go.

Project Logo Not Displaying on Project Github Page

For some reason the project image isn't display correctly. When I click on the link that's being displayed instead, it takes me to a page containing only the following message:

The image info also says the image is only fifteen bytes, so I'm not sure what's going on.

Implement an ORM

As per - https://github.com/codidact/core/projects/1#card-31580308
an ORM needs to be implemented.

As decided in https://forum.codidact.org/t/what-kind-of-orm-should-we-use-in-the-project/549/18
the ORM of choice is going to be EF Core Code First.

Do we have a CSRF Vulnerbility on the Logout Page?

Moved from codidact/authentication#5.

Refer to #62 (comment) .

Add an open source license.

Apply https://forum.codidact.org/t/what-software-license-should-we-use/205/29.

Cheers & good luck!

Project Issue and Pull Request Templates Needed

I'm about to create the pull request with some bare-bones templates. This page describes how the templates work and this page has some great information on other things we can do to keep improving the project contributor documentation.

Refactor MVC to Razor Pages.

The project currently uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. It was decided (citation needed) to use Razor Pages instead.

Please note, that the src/Auth project will be moved into a separate repository, therefor, this part of should be refactored later (?).

SSL Labs: Implement HSTS, remove TLS 1.1?

The SSL Labs result for Codidact shows that TLS 1.1 (deprecated) is supported and that HSTS is not.

The website "grade" given by SSL Labs (currently "A") will soon be capped at "B" due to support of TLS 1.1.

The website needs to support HSTS to get a grade of "A+".

Use local tools for ef

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Setup instructions require us to use the dotnet-ef tool globally. This wasn't a problem pre-3.0 since the EF version was tied to the SDK version in global.json. It's not anymore and different developer machines could end up with tool versions eventually.

Describe the solution you'd like
The tool should be installed locally for the project instead, so that there's a guarantee that every developer ends up using the same local tool version.

Create a request to list all questions

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The questions page should display all relevant questions.
Thus an API for that is needed.

Describe the solution you'd like
Create a repository inside of application project called Questions and retrieve the necessary questions based on the filters given from the client.
Validate the request, return errors if not valid.
Should be authorized.

Create a request for a new answer

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The user should have an ability to create a new answer after filling out the new answer body.
Thus an API for that is needed.

Describe the solution you'd like
Create a repository inside of application project called Answers and create the answer based on the data received from the client.
Validate the request, return errors if not valid.
Should be authorized.

Make '.editorconfig' less verbose.

Refer to #55.

A lot of the values in that configuration are the default anyway, in my opinion we should use the defaults and then discuss which options should be turned on / off.

Add instructions on how to setup the Client Secret for authentication

Since the project is using secrets, the Client Secret for the authentication should be managed by the secrets as well.

An instruction on how to do this should be added to:
https://github.com/codidact/core/blob/develop/docs/linux-instructions.md
https://github.com/codidact/core/blob/develop/docs/windows-instructions.md

The client secret placeholder can also be removed from https://github.com/codidact/core/blob/develop/src/WebUI/appsettings.json

TODO list -- tasks can be found and assigned here

Codidact core software — Permanent TODO list

Welcome to the Codidact project. We are glad, that you want to contribute to the software. See core/CONTRIBUTING.md for more information, on what kind of contributions are most helpful.

There is a list of open tasks at the bottom of this issue. See through them to find out, what you want to do. Completed tasks will be removed, tasks with a checked box are already assigned. Choose one and write a reply to this issue, saying that you want to claim it.

Claiming an issue means, that you have some responsibility. While this is an open-source project and nobody is paid for their work, we do expect tasks which have been claimed to be completed in a reasonable time. If you suddenly can’t continue, we’d be very glad, if you could give us notice and to publish everything you have already done to save others work.

You should also give us regular feedback. We will host regular meetings on our Discord server. We’ll announce a day, on which the feedback should be given there, soon. For all these status updates, ping @StatusUpdates. Just ask in any channel that seems to be appropriate, if you have any questions.

Todo list

• a good and easy-to-follow development environment setup guide, ideally containing documentation or linking to official documentation on how to add routes/views/controllers and on how to change the models/db schemata if needed
• having and deploying a development instance on a cloud service, which always contains the latest develop version
• creation of user profiles on account creation (registration only creates network-wide “accounts” AFAIK) (models already exist)
• showing user profiles (connecting with authentification, models already exist)
• editing user profiles (models already exist)
• showing questions (models already exist)
• adding questions (models already exist)
• editing questions (models already exist)
• showing answers to questions (models already exist)
• adding answers to questions (models already exist)
• adding and editing (changing) votes (models already exist)
• have and update trust levels (cron task?) (models already exist)

Add a C# linter and configure for Microsoft style guide

We should have a linter in the project to make it easy for folks to automatically fix their code to the style guide.

Style guide here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/inside-a-program/coding-conventions

Whatever we choose, we'll need to configure it for those settings.

Rename root namespace.

@DoctaJonez made the suggestion to rename the root namespace to match the recommended naming convention.

There was some discussion about this and the consensus was to rename the root namespace (citation needed).

Therefor, the namespaces should start with Codidact.Core.* (?).

Make it decentralized

Can we please use ActivityPub to make the software decentralized? Why have "100" isolated servers (with redundant content) when we can have one network comprised of "100" federating instances (servers).

Permission denied to create extension "adminpack".

I am not sure when this was introduced but the build is currently broken:

$ cd src/WebApp && dotnet run
fail: Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Database.Command[20102]
      Failed executing DbCommand (2ms) [Parameters=[], CommandType='Text', CommandTimeout='30']
      CREATE TYPE audit.history_activity_type AS ENUM ('CREATE', 'UPDATE_BEFORE', 'UPDATE_AFTER', 'DELETE');
      CREATE TYPE post_type AS ENUM ('question', 'answer', 'blog');
      CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS adminpack;
fail: Codidact.Core.WebApp.Startup[0]
      Unable to apply database migrations. Check the connection string in your appsettings file.
crit: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.Diagnostics[6]
      Application startup exception
Npgsql.PostgresException (0x80004005): 42501: permission denied to create extension "adminpack"
   at Codidact.Core.WebApp.Startup.ApplyDatabaseMigrations(IApplicationBuilder app, ILogger logger) in /home/me/dev/codidact/core/src/WebApp/Startup.cs:line 163
   at Codidact.Core.WebApp.Startup.Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env, ILogger`1 logger) in /home/me/dev/codidact/core/src/WebApp/Startup.cs:line 140
   at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor, Boolean wrapExceptions)
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.ConfigureBuilder.Invoke(Object instance, IApplicationBuilder builder)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.ConfigureBuilder.<>c__DisplayClass4_0.<Build>b__0(IApplicationBuilder builder)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.GenericWebHostBuilder.<>c__DisplayClass13_0.<UseStartup>b__2(IApplicationBuilder app)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Filters.MiddlewareFilterBuilderStartupFilter.<>c__DisplayClass0_0.<Configure>g__MiddlewareFilterBuilder|0(IApplicationBuilder builder)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.HostFilteringStartupFilter.<>c__DisplayClass0_0.<Configure>b__0(IApplicationBuilder app)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.GenericWebHostService.StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
  Exception data:
    Severity: ERROR
    SqlState: 42501
    MessageText: permission denied to create extension "adminpack"
    Hint: Must be superuser to create this extension.
    File: extension.c
    Line: 806
    Routine: execute_extension_script
Unhandled exception. Npgsql.PostgresException (0x80004005): 42501: permission denied to create extension "adminpack"
   at Codidact.Core.WebApp.Startup.ApplyDatabaseMigrations(IApplicationBuilder app, ILogger logger) in /home/me/dev/codidact/core/src/WebApp/Startup.cs:line 163
   at Codidact.Core.WebApp.Startup.Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env, ILogger`1 logger) in /home/me/dev/codidact/core/src/WebApp/Startup.cs:line 140
   at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor, Boolean wrapExceptions)
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.ConfigureBuilder.Invoke(Object instance, IApplicationBuilder builder)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.ConfigureBuilder.<>c__DisplayClass4_0.<Build>b__0(IApplicationBuilder builder)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.GenericWebHostBuilder.<>c__DisplayClass13_0.<UseStartup>b__2(IApplicationBuilder app)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Filters.MiddlewareFilterBuilderStartupFilter.<>c__DisplayClass0_0.<Configure>g__MiddlewareFilterBuilder|0(IApplicationBuilder builder)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.HostFilteringStartupFilter.<>c__DisplayClass0_0.<Configure>b__0(IApplicationBuilder app)
   at Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.GenericWebHostService.StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
   at Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.Internal.Host.StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
   at Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.HostingAbstractionsHostExtensions.RunAsync(IHost host, CancellationToken token)
   at Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.HostingAbstractionsHostExtensions.RunAsync(IHost host, CancellationToken token)
   at Codidact.Core.WebApp.Program.Main(String[] args) in /home/me/dev/codidact/core/src/WebApp/Program.cs:line 13
   at Codidact.Core.WebApp.Program.<Main>(String[] args)
  Exception data:
    Severity: ERROR
    SqlState: 42501
    MessageText: permission denied to create extension "adminpack"
    Hint: Must be superuser to create this extension.
    File: extension.c
    Line: 806
    Routine: execute_extension_script

I remember having a discussion somewhere, that some of the generated code referenced the "adminpack" extension somewhere. It is mentioned in some of the database migrations.

We should remove this from the migrations and find the cause of this issue.

Getting the community scope

I think we need to have this before being able to work on posts and users:

https://github.com/codidact/core/projects/1#card-31579420

A system, which parses the URL, gets the community ID from it, verifies, whether that is in the DB and if it is, loads some information (name, tagline) into memory and passes that to the further controllers and views.

I'd do it, but I don't have enough knowledge in ASP.NET Core, so I'd like to ask for volunteers doing it. :)

Please reply here, when you can do this and I'll assign this task to you.

Registration Page Needed

There is currently no registration page for the site. I am currently working on implementing it.