Caseflow - eFolder Express

About

FOIA Requests that give veterans access to their own VA files take way too long right now. eFolder Express allows VA employees to download all of a veteran's files in a fraction of the time it currently takes. It will also enable attorneys in the appeals process to use best-in-class legal tools to review these documents and so they can provide excellent service to America's veterans.

Start up your docker based environment

This guide may make assumptions that you have possibly already setup Caseflow.

We use docker and docker-compose to mock a production Renvironment locally. Prior knowledge of docker is not required, but slowly learning how docker works is encouraged. Please ask a team member for an overview, and/or slowly review the docs linked.

Your development setup of caseflow currently runs Redis, postgres and OracleDB (VACOLS) in Docker.

1. Setup your postgres user. Run this in your CLI, or better yet, add this to your shell configuration ~/.zshrc or

export POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
export POSTGRES_USER=postgres
export POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres

2. Copy Makefile.example into your own Makefile so you have easy access to common commands

ln -s Makefile.example Makefile

3. Start all containers

make up

docker-compose ps
# this shows you the status of all of your dependencies

If on M1 or M2 Mac:

make up-m1

Make sure to run make down in caseflow repo directory before running this or update ports in the docker-compose.yml to match. This is because Caseflow eFolder and Caseflow expect postgresql to be running on different ports.

4. Turning off dependencies

# this stops all containers
make down

# this will reset your setup back to scratch. You will need to setup your database schema again if you do this (see below)
docker-compose down -v

First Time Development Setup

This guide may make assumptions that you have possibly already setup Caseflow.

5. Make sure basic dependencies are setup

Checklist

• pg
• rbenv
• nodenv
  • node version in .nvmrc through nodenv
• yarn

6. You'll need the proper version of Ruby

rbenv install `cat .ruby-version`

7. Make sure postgresql is installed

postgres -v

If nothing was returned or it failed, run

brew install postgresql@14.8

8. The local DB requires a different port. This change will also allow you to run local tests. Add this to a .env file in your application root directory:

POSTGRES_PORT=15432
REDIS_URL_CACHE=redis://localhost:16379/0/cache/
REDIS_URL_SIDEKIQ=redis://localhost:16379

9. Install dependencies

make install

If there are issues see Issues in Setup

10. Create the database

bundle exec rake db:create

11. Load the schema

bundle exec rake db:schema:load

12. Run all the app components:

make run

If on M1 or M2 Mac:

make run-m1

13. Or run each component separately.

• the rails server

bundle exec rails s -p 3001

• In a separate terminal, watch for webpack changes

cd client && yarn run build --watch

• And in another separate terminal, start a jobs worker

bundle exec shoryuken start -q efolder_development_high_priority efolder_development_low_priority efolder_development_med_priority -R

14. If you want to convert TIFF files to PDFs then you also need to run the image converter service. You can do this by cloning the appeals-deployment repo, navigating to ansible/utility-roles/imagemagick/files and running docker-compose up. By default if this is not running, TIFFs will gracefully not convert.

If you want to test out the DEMO flow (without VBMS connection),

15. Visit http://localhost:3001, Test using one of the fake files in this list, all beginnning with "DEMO" (i.e. "DEMO1") Watch it download your fake file.

Issues In Setup

When running make install if an error occurs see below for possible solutions:

libv8

An error occurred while installing libv8 (3.16.14.19), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install libv8 -v '3.16.14.19' --source 'https://rubygems.org/'` succeeds

Run the commands to resolve the issue

brew install v8@3.15
bundle config --local build.libv8 --with-system-v8
bundle config --local build.therubyracer --with-v8-dir=/usr/local/opt/v8@3.15

mimemagic

An error occurred while installing mimemagic (0.3.7), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install mimemagic -v '0.3.7' --source 'https://rubygems.org/'` succeeds before bundling.

See mimemageic to resolve the issue.

Running Migrations

If a pending migration exists, you will need to run them against both the development and test database.

make migrate
RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:migrate

Running Caseflow and Caseflow eFolder at same time

This assumes neither was started initially and you are spinning up Caseflow then Caseflow eFolder. The docker-compose-local.yml file sets the postgresql ports to be same as what Caseflow uses.

1. Configure Caseflow to use Caseflow eFolder locally
   1. Set config.use_efolder_locally to true
   2. Set config.efolder_url to http://localhost:3001/
2. Start Caseflow in another terminal
3. In the Caseflow terminal run docker ps a.
4. Check to see if a redis and postgresql container is running.
5. In another terminal in the Caseflow eFolder directory run the command docker-compose -f docker-compose-local.yml appeals-localstack-aws up -d
   1. If postgresql or redis was not running in step 4 add after appeals-localstack-aws in the above command the following values
      1. For postgresql add appeals-postgres
      2. For redis add appeals-redis
      3. Example if all 3 need to be spun up docker-compose -f docker-compose-local.yml appeals-redis appeals-postgres appeals-localstack-aws up -d
6. Update the .env file to have

POSTGRES_PORT=5432

Running Tests

Run the test suite:

make test

Test coverage

We use the simplecov gem to evaluate test coverage as part of the CircleCI process.

If you see a test coverage failure in Github Actions, you can evaluate test coverage locally for the affected files using the single_cov gem.

Add the line to any rspec file locally:

SingleCov.covered!

and run that file under rspec.

SINGLE_COV=true bundle exec rspec spec/path/to/file_spec.rb

Missing test coverage will be reported automatically at the end of the test run.

Monitoring

We use NewRelic to monitor the app. By default, it's disabled locally. To enable it, do:

NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY='<key as displayed on NewRelic.com>' NEW_RELIC_AGENT_ENABLED=true bundle exec rails s

You may wish to do this if you are debugging our NewRelic integration, for instance.

Additional Setup

Add this to your shell configuration ~/.zshrc.

#AWS Localstack 
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="us-east-1" 
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="dummykeyid" 
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="dummysecretkey"   
export AWS_SQS_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:4576" 

Run connected to UAT

First, you'll need a VA machine. Next, you'll need the secrets file. These come from the appeals deployment repo. Run decrypt.sh and source the appropriate secrets environment.

Then you must setup the staging DB. Run:

RAILS_ENV=staging rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=staging rake db:schema:load

Finally, you can run the server and shoryuken. In one tab you can run:

rails s -e staging

In a separate tab run:

RAILS_ENV=staging bundle exec shoryuken start -q efolder_staging_high_priority efolder_staging_low_priority efolder_staging_med_priority -R

Now when you go to localhost:3001 you'll be prompted with a fake login screen. Use any of these logins to impersonate a UAT user.

SAML Auth and SSO

See internal wiki page for background.

This application acts as a Service Provider to the VA IAM SAML SSO IdP (Identity Provider). The cookie set here is shared by Caseflow.