Productionize
Going to production and depending on your requirements things to think about could be:
- HTTPS/TLS termination
- locking down access
- setting up Email
- deployment
- introspection
- disaster recovery
TLS termination
The most important thing alongside ensuring proper access protection is to set up TLS termination ensuring that all traffic from your users to your termination point is encrypted. In practice, this means putting TrailBase behind a reverse proxy such as NGinx, Caddy, … . The main benefit of using an established reverse proxy is the availability of auto-renewal of self-signed certificates with SSL authorities Let’s encrypt.
Access
API access
Make sure to use record API’s authorization primitives to tighten access to
data as much as possible. It’s a good idea to check _REQ_.<user_id> == _USER_.id on record creations and updates to avoid users can impersonate or
touch on other users records.
Admin access
You can expose TrailBase’s admin APIs and UIs on a separate private port as an extra precaution and to simply expose a smaller surface.
Protect Configuration
You can prevent TrailBase configuration from being accidentally changed in prod, e.g. when you think you’re actually configuring a dev instances. To do so, you can read-only mount the configuration directory. However, make sure the data directory remains writable.
By default TrailBase will be using your machine’s sendmail setup. This can lead to messages not being sent at all and likely getting stuck in spam filters not coming from a well-known Email server.
You should likely set up TrailBase with an SMTP server that can send Email coming from your domain. If you don’t have an Email provider yet, an option could be Brevo, Mailchimp, SendGrid, … .
Deployment
We recommend containerization (e.g. Docker) for convenience. You can also
consider to mount certain directories and files such as <data_dir>/secrets
and <data_dir>/config.textproto as read only.
Introspection
TrailBase’s introspection is fairly non-existent at this point. There is a
/api/healthcheck endpoint for container orchestration systems to probe.
You could also consider setting up probers probing other endpoints.
Disaster Recovery
The simplest option is to mount anothjer local or remote drive and use TrailBase’s periodic backups. However, this may lead to significant data loss in case of a disaster, which may be acceptable for first party content but likely not for user-generated content.
A more comprehensive approach may be to use Litestream to continuously replicate your database.