Icon Library Architecture

Icons are created and uploaded to an s3 bucket for storage. The s3 bucket is registered with CloudFront so it can act as a CDN for consumption in web applications.

AWS CloudFront hosts and exposes both: patterns.boston.gov and assets.boston.gov

assets.boston.gov

Overview

This sub-domain is principally designed to act as a centralized, public CDN serving media assets (images, icons and docs) from the patterns server. It is on a separate sub-domain from the patterns server to simplify relocation of these assets to a different resource (i.e. apart from the css and js elements of the fleet patterns server) in the future should the need arise.

Architecture

• The icon folder in the fleet pattern library is located inside the main s3 bucket named patterns.boston.gov

• The /assets folder of this s3 bucket is referenced by a CloudFront Distribution (arn:aws:cloudfront::251803681989:distribution/E2NTMFQ3KYUMFB) which is exposed as a public website at the URL https://d33pore7x73r0y.cloudfront.net.

• The CoB LAN team have created a sub-domain assets.boston.gov on the public DNS servers, and this sub-domain has a CNAME which points tohttps://d33pore7x73r0y.cloudfront.net.

• The AWS Certificate Manager (us-east-1) manages an AWS wildcard certificate for *.boston.gov (why not use the cob main wildcard cert??). This certificate is applied to the CloudFront Distribution to secure HTTPS traffic to the sub-domain endpoint.

• The CoB LAN team have created a second sub-domain assets_sftp.boston.gov on the public DNS servers, and this sub-domain has a CNAME which points to s-27207a4a63144da48.server.transfer.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

• An SFTP server has been created with a custom host name of assets_sftp.boston.gov and users created with home directories pointing to the /patterns.boston.gov/assets .

• There is a Lambda function "watching" the s3 bucket patterns.boston.gov/assets . When files are added to this folder, and event is fired which launches a node12.x script that updates a manifest.txt on assets.boston.gov file containing the current directory contents. This file is consumed by a cron process in Drupal which updates the Drupal Media Library with the new icons. Note: Delete actions do not delete icons from the library.

Local Development

Designers and other individuals who require FTP access to contribute to assets in the patterns library need to do the following:

Connect Via SFTP Client

1. Ask and AWS admin to create an IAM account in AWS (if not one already).

2. Have the user (create and) load an SSH key onto their account in AWS.

3. Add the user to the Users list in the SFTP server on AWS.

4. Test a connection to the SFTP server at https://assets_sftp.boston.gov using filezilla or another FTP client which can create SFTP connections.

5. [optional] Create a local mount on the designers Mac.sshfs -o rw,IdentityFile=/Users/doitimac/.ssh/id_rsa username@assets_sftp.boston.gov:/patterns.boston.gov/assets /mnt/patterns/

(Optional) Mounting AWS SFTP as a Drive (Mac)