The motivation for supporting an alternative to WebSockets is that while all browsers supported by Grist offer native WebSocket support, some networking environments do not allow WebSocket traffic.
Engine.IO is used as the underlying implementation of HTTP long polling. The Grist client will first attempt a regular WebSocket connection, using the same protocol and endpoints as before, but fall back to long polling using Engine.IO if the WebSocket connection fails.
Include these changes:
- CORS websocket requests are now rejected as a stronger security measure. This shouldn’t affect anything in practice; but previously it could be possible to make unauthenticated websocket requests from another origin.
- GRIST_HOST variable no longer affects CORS responses (also should not affect anything in practice, as it wasn't serving a useful purpose)
Summary:
- Node has a strong recommendation to assume bad state and exit promptly on
unhandled exceptions and rejections. We follow it, and only make an effort to
clean up before exiting, and to log the error in a more standard way.
- The only case seen in recent month of an unhandled rejection was for
attempting to write overly large JSON to a Client websocket. Ensure that's
handled, and add a test case that artificially reproduces this scenario.
Test Plan:
Added a test case for failing write to Client, and a test case that unhandled
errors indeed kill the server but with an attempt at cleanup.
Reviewers: georgegevoian
Reviewed By: georgegevoian
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D4124
Summary:
By default, only respect GRIST_FORWARD_AUTH_HEADER on login endpoints; sessions are used elsewhere.
With GRIST_IGNORE_SESSION, do not use sessions, and respect GRIST_FORWARD_AUTH_HEADER on all endpoints.
GRIST_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER is now a synonym to GRIST_FORWARD_AUTH_HEADER.
Test Plan: Fixed tests. Tested first approach (no GRIST_IGNORE_SESSION) with grist-omnibus manually. Tested the second approach (with GRIST_IGNORE_SESSION) with a Apache-based setup enforcing http basic auth on all endpoints.
Reviewers: paulfitz, georgegevoian
Reviewed By: paulfitz, georgegevoian
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D4104
Summary:
- Implements MemoryPool for waiting on memory reservations.
- Uses MemoryPool to control memory used for stringifying JSON responses in Client.ts
- Limits total size of _missedMessages that may be queued for a particular client.
- Upgrades ws library, which may reduce memory usage, and allows pausing the websocket for testing.
- The upgrade changed subtle behavior corners, requiring various fixes to code and tests.
- dos.ts:
- Includes Paul's fixes and updates to the dos.ts script for manual stress-testing.
- Logging tweaks, to avoid excessive dumps on uncaughtError, and include timestamps.
Test Plan:
- Includes a test that measures heap size, and fails without memory management.
- Includes a unittest for MemoryPool
- Some cleanup and additions to TestServer helper; in particular adds makeUserApi() helper used in multiple tests.
- Some fixes related to ws upgrade.
Reviewers: paulfitz
Reviewed By: paulfitz
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D3974
Summary:
Building:
- Builds no longer wait for tsc for either client, server, or test targets. All use esbuild which is very fast.
- Build still runs tsc, but only to report errors. This may be turned off with `SKIP_TSC=1` env var.
- Grist-core continues to build using tsc.
- Esbuild requires ES6 module semantics. Typescript's esModuleInterop is turned
on, so that tsc accepts and enforces correct usage.
- Client-side code is watched and bundled by webpack as before (using esbuild-loader)
Code changes:
- Imports must now follow ES6 semantics: `import * as X from ...` produces a
module object; to import functions or class instances, use `import X from ...`.
- Everything is now built with isolatedModules flag. Some exports were updated for it.
Packages:
- Upgraded browserify dependency, and related packages (used for the distribution-building step).
- Building the distribution now uses esbuild's minification. babel-minify is no longer used.
Test Plan: Should have no behavior changes, existing tests should pass, and docker image should build too.
Reviewers: georgegevoian
Reviewed By: georgegevoian
Subscribers: alexmojaki
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D3506
Summary:
- Substantial refactoring of the logic when the server fails to send some
messages to a client.
- Add seqId numbers to server messages to ensure reliable order.
- Add a needReload flag in clientConnect for a clear indication whent the
browser client needs to reload the app.
- Reproduce some potential failure scenarios in a test case (some of which
previously could have led to incorrectly ordered messages).
- Convert other Comm tests to typescript.
- Tweak logging of Comm and Client to be slightly more concise (in particular,
avoid logging sessionId)
Note that despite the big refactoring, this only addresses a fairly rare
situation, with websocket failures while server is trying to send to the
client. It includes no improvements for failures while the client is sending to
the server.
(I looked for an existing library that would take care of these issues. A relevant article I found is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-web-pubsub/howto-develop-reliable-clients, but it doesn't include a library for both ends, and is still in review. Other libraries with similar purposes did not inspire enough confidence.)
Test Plan: New test cases, which reproduce some previously problematic scenarios.
Reviewers: paulfitz
Reviewed By: paulfitz
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D3470
Summary:
For self-hosted Grist, forward auth has proven useful, where
some proxy wrapped around Grist manages authentication, and
passes on user information to Grist in a trusted header.
The current implementation is adequate when Grist is the
only place where the user logs in or out, but is confusing
otherwise (see https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/issues/207).
Here we take some steps to broaden the scenarios Grist's
forward auth support can be used with:
* When a trusted header is present and is blank, treat
that as the user not being logged in, and don't look
any further for identity information. Specifically,
don't look in Grist's session information.
* Add a `GRIST_IGNORE_SESSION` flag to entirely prevent
Grist from picking up identity information from a cookie,
in order to avoid confusion between multiple login methods.
* Add tests for common scenarios.
Test Plan: added tests
Reviewers: georgegevoian
Reviewed By: georgegevoian
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D3482
Summary:
- Add app/common/CommTypes.ts to define types shared by client and server.
- Include @types/ws npm package
Test Plan: Intended to have no changes in behavior
Reviewers: paulfitz
Reviewed By: paulfitz
Differential Revision: https://phab.getgrist.com/D3467
