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Kansa

Kansa is a convention member management system originally developed for Worldcon 75, the World Science Fiction Convention organised in Helsinki in 2017. It is also used by Dublin 2019: An Irish Worldcon and CoNZealand, the 2020 Worldcon.

The system is modular and extensible. Together with its front-end client it provides the following services:

  • Member admin services, including an easy-to use admin front-end
  • Support for multiple membership types, as well as for non-member accounts
  • Stripe integration for membership and other purchases (via credit cards or SEPA direct debit)
  • Individual and bulk import of member data and transactions from other systems
  • Member-facing front-end for e.g. name and address changes
  • Passwordless authentication using login links sent by email
  • Emails sent using Sendgrid and customisable templates
  • Synchronisation of contact info to Sendgrid for mass mailings

To help with at-con registration, Kansa has:

  • Pre-con badge preview and customisation (with Unicode support)
  • Printable/displayable barcodes for quick member identification
  • Streamlined UI for registration staff, including on-demand badge printing
  • Local caching that enables continued use even during network failures

Specifically of interest to Worldcons, Kansa also provides:

  • Hugo Awards nomination and voting front-end for members
  • Throttled/delayed email confirmations for nominators and voters
  • Canonicalisation and category correction interface for Hugo admins
  • Detailed reports on nomination and vote counts & results
  • Secure hosting for the Hugo packet
  • Site Selection token generator for online sales
  • Member-specific Site Selection ballot PDF generator
  • Token verification front-end for at-con Site Selection staff
  • Custom data exports for matching member data for Site Selection purposes

Setting up and maintaining your own Kansa instance will require some experience with JavaScript and PostgreSQL. The front-end is a React app, while most of the back-end services run on node.js; the various parts are wrapped up in Docker containers. Work is ongoing to make the system more configurable and customisable, so fewer changes in code are required for convention-specific changes.

Getting Started

To get a dev environment up and running, first clone this repo. Then you'll need to have Docker Compose available, as that's used by default for container orchestration. To start, run make start or call docker-compose directly:

docker-compose \
  -f config/docker-compose.base.yaml -f config/docker-compose.dev.yaml \
  -p api up --build -d  # leave out the -d to not detach

Once you have all the services up and running, your development server should be available at https://localhost:4430/, including a relatively recent front-end client (with code hosted under GitHub Pages). You'll need to bypass your browser's complaint about the server's self-singed certificate:

  • Chrome: Click on Advanced, then Proceed to localhost:4430. Alternatively, go to chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost and enable the option to "Allow invalid certificates for resources loaded from localhost"
  • Firefox: Click on I Understand the Risks, then Add Exception..., then Get Certificate, and finally Confirm Security Exception
  • IE: Click on Continue to this website (not recommended)
  • Safari: Click on Show Certificate, Always Trust "example.com" when connecting to "example.com", then Continue
  • curl: Use the -k or --insecure flag to perform "insecure" SSL connections

The development server is bootstrapped with an admin account [email protected] using the key key, which you may login as by visiting either of the addresses https://localhost:4430/login/[email protected]/key (for smooth browser redicretion) or https://localhost:4430/api/[email protected]&key=key (direct login, with JSON response).

Configuration

For production use and otherwise, the services' configuration is controlled by the Docker Compose config files. For development use, run make in the project root to include the base config docker-compose.base.yaml and the development config docker-compose.dev.yaml. For production use, the base config will instead need to be overridden by docker-compose.prod.yaml, which you will need to base on docker-compose.prod-template.yaml and fill with appropriate variable values (see make prod). Make sure that your production secrets are not committed to any repository!

For the most part, services are configured using environment variables, some of which need to match across services:

  • JWT_SECRET and SESSION_SECRET allow the servers to share authenticated sessions
  • DATABASE_URL and *_PG_PASSWORD are required for the services' database connections

Email messages are based on message templates, which are documented separately.

Directory Overview

  • common - Shared utilities for the server & modules, published on npm as @kansa/common
  • config - System configuration, see in particular config/kansa.yaml
  • integration-tests - Tests for the REST API endpoints
  • kyyhky - Internal mailing service & SendGrid integration for hugo & kansa
  • modules - Optional server modules providing additional functionality
  • postgres - Configuration & schemas for our database
  • proxy - An SSL-terminating reverse proxy & file server, using OpenResty
  • server - Provides the core parts of the REST API
  • tools - Semi-automated tools for importing data, and for other tasks
  • tuohi - Fills out a PDF form, for GET /people/:id/ballot

The Hugo Awards are awards that are nominated and selected by the members of each year's Worldcon. Kansa is Finnish for "people" or "tribe", Kyyhky is "pigeon", Raami is "frame", and Tuohi is the bark of a birch tree.

Common Issues

The particular places that may need manual adjustment are:

  • Connections to the server require TLS (HTTPS, WSS). For ease of development the repo includes a self-signed certificate for localhost. This will not be automatically accepted by browsers or other clients. If you have a signed certificate you can use (and therefore a publicly visible address), you'll want to add the certificate files to proxy/ssl/ and adjust the environment values set for the proxy service in docker-compose.override.yaml and/or your docker-compose.prod.yaml.

  • The CORS_ORIGIN variables in the docker-compose config files need to be space-separated lists of addresses at which client apps may be hosted, to allow for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. By default, the value should match the http://localhost:8080 address of the client Webpack dev servers.

  • If you're running the server on a separate machine or if you've changed the proxy port configuration, you may need to tell clients where to find the server, using something like export API_HOST='remote.example.com' before running npm start.

If you'd like to help with this project, please fell free to fork it and submit pull requests, or get in touch with us at [email protected].