pgeu-meetingserver

This is the server component of the meeting system in pgeu-system. It serves as a basic relay for handling meetings, including polls and archiving of the data. It is fully integrated with the pgeu-system, and needs direct access to the PostgreSQL database of that system in order to operate.

Operating

The server should normally be served behind a proxy such as nginx, which will be responsible for handling TLS termination and possible access controls. It is intended to run continuously as a service, and will open and close meetings as necessary based on the contents of the database.

Commandline syntax

pgeu-meetingserver -origin origin [-behindproxy] [-dburl url] [-listen listen] [-profilelisten profilelisten]

The following parameters can be set:

-origin origin

This specifies a value to validate the origin header of the incoming http requests against. This would normally be the base URL of the website hosting the pgeu system (e.g. https://www.domain.com/). To disable origin validation (not recommended in production), specify the value *.

-behindproxy

Including this flag tells the server to decode and use the value from the HTTP header X-Forwarded-For if one is present. This header is typically set by the proxy server, and if it is not set by the proxy server this flag should not be specified.

-dburl url

Specifies a Go lib/pq style database URL to connect to PostgreSQL. If it's not specified, the default value of postgres:///postgresqleu is used, which will connect to the database postgresqleu using a Unix domain socket.

-listen listen

Specifies either a host:port combination or a Unix socket location to listen for incoming http requests on. If none is specified, the server will by default listen to 127.0.0.1:8199. If the value starts with a slash, it is interpreted as the path of a Unix socket to listen on, and should not include a port number.

-profilelisten profilelisten

Specifies listener in the same syntax as -listen that will allow access to the Go profiler data over http. This endpoint has no authentication and if used should only specify a local or otherwise already authenticated endpoint. If not specified, the profiler data is not made available.

Nginx sample

When a service is run per above, serving the data over a Unix socket for example, the following nginx config snippet shows up to set up proxying to the server:

location /ws/meeting/ {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/tmp/.meetingserver_socket;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_read_timeout 120;
}

As the websockets used are long lived, the proxy_read_timeout must be set high enough. The server will send websocket ping/pong messages every 60 seconds, so a value double that is a reasonable safety margin.