CubeCobra

An open source web application for building, managing, and playtesting Magic: the Gathering cubes.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing towards Cube Cobra, please read the Contribution guidelines for this project.

Setup

Install Prerequisites

You will need to install NodeJS, Redis, and an IDE of your preference (I recommend VSCode). You can find the necessary resources here:

NodeJS: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

Redis Server:

• Windows: https://github.com/microsoftarchive/redis
• Mac: brew install redis
• Linux: apt-get install redis

VSCode (strongly recommended, but not required): https://code.visualstudio.com/ ESLint Extension for VSCode: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dbaeumer.vscode-eslint

VSCode (with the ESLint extension) is the recommended environment. When using this setup, make sure that your selected workspace is the root folder that you have cloned, this will ensure that the ESLint plugin can work with our linting rules. Using this plugin will make adhering to the linting rules significantly easier.

Environment Variables

Environment variables are populated from the .env file. There is no .env file checked in, so the first thing you need to do is copy .env_EXAMPLE to .env and fill out the values. Cube Cobra uses several AWS resources, including S3, DynamoDB, and Cloudwatch. For development purposes, you will need to create an AWS account and insert your credentials into the .env file.

Here is a table on how to fill out the env vars:

Variable Name	Description	Required?
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	The AWS access key for your account.	Yes
AWS_LOG_GROUP	The name of the AWS CloudWatch log group to use.	Yes
AWS_LOG_STREAM	The name of the AWS CloudWatch log stream to use.
AWS_REGION	The AWS region to use.	Yes
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	The AWS secret access key for your account.	Yes
CUBECOBRA_VERSION	The version of Cube Cobra.
DATA_BUCKET	The name of the AWS S3 bucket to use. You will need to create this bucket in your account.	Yes
DOMAIN	The domain name of the server. Used for external redirects such as emails.	Yes
DOWNTIME_ACTIVE	Whether or not the site is in downtime mode.
DYNAMO_PREFIX	The prefix to use for DynamoDB tables. You can leave this as the default value	Yes
EMAIL_CONFIG_PASSWORD	The password for the email account to use for sending emails.
EMAIL_CONFIG_USERNAME	The username for the email account to use for sending emails.
ENV	The environment to run Cube Cobra in.	Yes
NITROPAY_ENABLED	Whether or not to enable NitroPay, our ad provider.
NODE_ENV	The environment to run Cube Cobra in.	Yes
PATREON_CLIENT_ID	The client ID for the Patreon OAuth app.
PATREON_CLIENT_SECRET	The client secret for the Patreon OAuth app.
PATREON_HOOK_SECRET	The secret for the Patreon webhook.
PATREON_REDIRECT	The redirect URL for the Patreon OAuth app.
PORT	The port to run Cube Cobra on.	Yes
REDIS_HOST	The URL of the Redis server.	Yes
REDIS_SETUP	Whether or not to setup the Redis server - this is needed for Redis but not for elasticache.
SECRET	A secret phrase for encryption. You can leave the default value.	Yes
SESSION_SECRET	A secret phrase for session encryption. You can leave the default value.	Yes
SESSION	The name of the session cookie. You can leave the default value.	Yes
TCG_PLAYER_PRIVATE_KEY	The private key for the TCGPlayer API.
TCG_PLAYER_PUBLIC_KEY	The public key for the TCGPlayer API.
CACHE_ENABLED	Whether or not to enable caching.
AUTOSCALING_GROUP	The name of the autoscaling group this instance is run in, used for the distributed cache.
CACHE_SECRET	The secret for the distributed cache.

Initial Setup

For the first setup, you will need to run:

npm ci && npm run nearley && npm run webpack
node one_shot_scripts/create_local_files.js
node --max-old-space-size=4096 one_shot_scripts/createTables.js
node --max-old-space-size=4096 jobs/update_cards.js

If you are on Windows, you will need to set bash as your script shell: You will need to make sure you have bash installed somewhere and run the following command [with your bash path in place of the path below].

npm config set script-shell "C:\\Program Files\\git\\bin\\bash.exe"

Then you can start the program like so:

npm run devstart

You can now open up a browser and connect to the app through: http://localhost:8080. Despite the fact that node says it is running on port 5000, you should use port 8080 to connect.

Nodemon will restart the application anytime there is a change to a source file.

Updating Card Definitions and Analytics

From the previous script, jobs/update_cards is what creates the card definitions. Running this script will pull the latest data from scryfall. If you want card analytics, you'll need to run the following scripts in this order:

node --max-old-space-size=4096 jobs/update_draft_history.js
node --max-old-space-size=4096 jobs/update_cube_history.js
node --max-old-space-size=4096 jobs/update_metadata_dict.js
node --max-old-space-size=4096 jobs/update_cards.js

Concepts

Cards

We keep all card definitions in large pre-processed files, so that nodes in production just need to download and load the files, and can fetch the latest files from S3 when they're ready. We do this because it's much faster to read from memory than to have to make requests to some other service anytime we need card data. An external process is responsible for updating the card definitions, and uploading to S3. This same process is also responsible for updating the card analytics, and data exports.

Multiplayer Drafting

We use redis for concurrency control for multiplayer drafting. All redis operations are handled in multiplayerDrafting.js