app/

DPhoto - VIEWER

WEB viewer for photo and video backed up with DPhoto command line interface.

Main features:

• authenticate with Google account
• online viewer for backed-up photos and videos
• download medias pack, selected by date, album, and/or tags

Getting Started

App contains several sub-projects:

• viewer API: serverless backend to serve data for viewer (golang)
• viewer UI: create-react-app deployed as static website on S3 (typescript)
• (roadmap) more generic API to be used by CLI instead of direct IAM role

They are all deployed as a monolith using Serverless Framework. To deploy on dev:

# test, build, and deploy
make deploy

# only re-deploy
sls deploy

# destroy all software bits (not the data managed by 'infra-data')
sls remove

Backend code is following the hexagonal architecture: core logic is developed in domain and imported here.

Authentication - Design Decisions

Authentication requirement is only to use Google oauth. AWS Cognito and Auth0 has been investigated to bring a larger authentication-as-a-service, but final decision is to use directly Google APIs.

AaaS solutions bring sign-in, email/phone number confirmation, password recovery, MFA, ... that are all non-wanted and should be disabled. Ease to use and integrate is the main expectation.

AWS Cognito is complex to provision and does not provide React library (including Amplify) or documentation making the integration simple. The Access Token is not customisable: subject is the user UUID from Cognito (not recognised by DPhoto) and no claims can support multi-tenancy of DPhoto. A second level of authentication, or verification against database, would be required to use it.

Auth0 is much easier to integrate with their JS library, and has customisation claims feature on the access token. Provisioning it, especially from CloudFormation (Serverless Framework), is very complex.

Google Identity, retained solution, requires a lot of manual development: on the UI an opensource react component is used to redirect to Google and get the identity token from the user. Then this token is used to authenticate on DPhoto and get an access token.