miniblister / mario

DEPRECATED: Initial repo for some shared thoughts around a shopping cart idea.

IMPORTANT WARNING

Note: This project currently uses nodemailer, which seems to suffer from, or benefit from, a tightening of security in Node itself. This is well-documented, but a little obscure. It manifests itself as an error concerning Self-signed SSL Certificates. We made the documented hack and got it working.

However, I doubt this code will work out-of-the-box for you unless you make the same hack after install nodemailer.

Mario : What is this project?

The basic purpose of Mario is to support the email processing of the Communicart (C2) diet. We are using Mario as the Node.js-based mail reader. It also invokes the gsa-advantage-scraper.

We could have implemented this in the C2 rails application, and may still move that feature there.

The basic execution of Mario is that you execute it once, which reads any unread mail. We use a cron job to run it every minute.

This architecture allow us to keep C2 independent of the GSA Advantage.

How to Install Mario

1. Install Node.js 0.10
2. Run npm install.
3. Copy configs.js.EXAMPLE to configs.js and adjust the values there.

In particular, Mario is meant to be installed on the same server with C2, and the path to the shared constants file in C2 should be set in C2_APPLICATION_YML_PATH.

Mario needs these variable to be set into the environment where it runs:

NODE_ENV # (optional) can be set to 'debug' or 'development'

GSA_USERNAME # username for GSA Advantage for the scraper
GSA_PASSWORD # password used by the scraper to pass to GSA Advantage

DYNO_CART_SENDER # email address to read from
COMMUNICART_DOT_SENDER # password for the DYNO_CART_SENDER email

C2_SERVER_ENDPOINT # domain that points to the C2 API
C2_API_KEY # API key assigned to your application for accessing the C2 API. To request a key, please contact <[email protected]>

This mechanism avoids the danger of setting a password in the repo and accidentally committing it.

Although Mario can be used in a number of ways, we normally use a crontab job to run it once a minute. The job actually implements a shell scripts which ensures the environmental variables are correctly exported, and then Mario is invoked, piping the output to a log file.

For debugging, you can of course invoke it by hand. Additionally, there is a flag not to mark email as unread, which allows repetitive execution without a need to recreate the initiating emails.

How to Test Mario

To run the test suite, run npm test. To check code coverage, run npm run-script coverage.