Outpost Server

The outpost server is used to store data from Arweave from querying from our frontend. In order to provide a comparable user experience to web2 platforms, we also process transactions optimistically. That is, we assume they'll go through and upload them to the server. When the transaction is confirmed, we'll updated it in our backend.

Prerequisites

• A postgres database you can connect to
• An api key for infura
• An Arweave Wallet

Setup

Create a .env.development file in the root of the repo and a add the following

DATABASE_URL=url_to_your_postgres_db
INFURA_ID=id_from_infura
INFURA_SECRET=secret_from_infura
HASH_SECRET=random_string_thats_used_with_verifying_auth_tokens
SECRET_PASSWORD=random_string_for_encrypting_your_wallet
OUTPOST_AR_ADDRESS=your_wallet_address
WALLET_PATH=local_path_to_your_wallet

HASH_SECRET and SECRET_PASSWORD can be any random strings. SECRET_PASSWORD is used for encrypting your arweave keyfile. HASH_SECRET is used to create an hmac of a users auth token. This should be simplified to just creating a regular hash of the auth token without HASH_SECRET, but you'll need it for now.

Install Dependencies

yarn install

Encrypt your wallet

We have to commit and push our wallet to heroku for production. To make sure we don't accidentally commit our wallet to github, we are encrypting it.

NODE_ENV=development node encryptWallet.js

This creates a wallet.sec file in the root of your repository which is your wallet encrypted with SECRET_PASSWORD as the key.

(Optional) Add Publications to DB

If you need to run our UI, you may need to add publications to the database. To do so, add your publication's information to scripts/publication.ts. The images can just be empty strings for testing.

NODE_ENV=development yarn addCommunities:dev

Start the Server

yarn start

The Repo

• ./src/schema.js
  • The schema exposed by graphql
• ./src/store
  • The models for the database and logic we reuse for querying and updating the database.
• ./src/runner
  • The runner script continuously queries Arweave for updates. When new blocks are added to the chain, we'll find all transactions related to our app and process them.
• ./src/dataSources
  • The dataSources apollo uses for queries and mutations.

Quickstart

• Make sure you have Docker installed.
• Next, save some [Ethereum Wallet] JSON as ./wallet.json.
• Make a copy of .env.example and rename it to .env.
  • Save this in the project directory!
• Once that's done, grab an Infura API publicKey and secretKey, and paste this content in the project's .env file.
• Okay, that's the config done! Next, open a new terminal and execute docker-compose -f quickstart.yml up to launch the test Postgres database we'll use to store Outpost content.
  • Note: To stop the docker instance, run docker ps -l to find the ID of the Docker container, then call docker container kill <container-id>. You can also remove the instance and it's data altogether by running docker container rm <container-id>.
  • If you'd like, you can add some example communities by running yarn addCommunities:dev.
  • You can also add some example posts by calling yarn addPublications:dev. :)
• Finally, to launch the API, run yarn start in the project directory. The Outpost API should then become available on http://localhost:4000.