opencloud/services/settings

Settings

The settings service provides functionality for other services to register new settings as well as storing and retrieving the respective settings' values.

Settings Managed

The settings service is currently used for managing the:

• users' profile settings like the language and the email notification settings,
• possible user roles and their respective permissions,
• assignment of roles to users.

As an example, user profile settings that can be changed in the Web UI must be persistent.

The settings service supports two different backends for persisting the data. The backend can be set via the SETTINGS_STORE_TYPE environment variable. Supported values are:

• metadata: The default. This backend persists the settings data via the storage-system service.
• filesystem: (deprecated) This backend persists the settings data in a directory on the local filesystem. The directory can be configured with SETTINGS_DATA_PATH. This backend is not suitable for running multiple intances of the settings service in a scale-out deployment and was therefore deprecated.

Caching

When using SETTINGS_STORE_TYPE=metadata, the settings service caches the results of queries against the storage backend to provide faster responses. The content of this cache is independent of the cache used in the storage-system service as it caches directory listing and settings content stored in files.

The store used for the cache can be configured using the SETTINGS_CACHE_STORE environment variable. Possible stores are:

• memory: Basic in-memory store and the default.
• redis-sentinel: Stores data in a configured Redis Sentinel cluster.
• nats-js-kv: Stores data using key-value-store feature of nats jetstream
• noop: Stores nothing. Useful for testing. Not recommended in production environments.
• ocmem: Advanced in-memory store allowing max size. (deprecated)
• redis: Stores data in a configured Redis cluster. (deprecated)
• etcd: Stores data in a configured etcd cluster. (deprecated)
• nats-js: Stores data using object-store feature of nats jetstream (deprecated)

Other store types may work but are not supported currently.

Note: The service can only be scaled if not using memory store and the stores are configured identically over all instances!

Note that if you have used one of the deprecated stores, you should reconfigure to one of the supported ones as the deprecated stores will be removed in a later version.

Store specific notes:

• When using redis-sentinel, the Redis master to use is configured via e.g. OCIS_CACHE_STORE_NODES in the form of <sentinel-host>:<sentinel-port>/<redis-master> like 10.10.0.200:26379/mymaster.
• When using nats-js-kv it is recommended to set OCIS_CACHE_STORE_NODES to the same value as OCIS_EVENTS_ENDPOINT. That way the cache uses the same nats instance as the event bus.
• When using the nats-js-kv store, it is possible to set OCIS_CACHE_DISABLE_PERSISTENCE to instruct nats to not persist cache data on disc.

Settings Management

Infinite Scale services can register settings bundles with the settings service.

Settings Usage

Services can set or query Infinite Scale setting values of a user from settings bundles.

Service Accounts

The settings service needs to know the IDs of service accounts but it doesn't need their secrets. They can be configured using the SETTINGS_SERVICE_ACCOUNTS_IDS envvar. When only using one service account OCIS_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_ID can also be used. All configured service accounts will get a hidden 'service-account' role. This role contains all permissions the service account needs but will not appear calls to the list roles endpoint. It is not possible to assign the 'service-account' role to a normal user.

Default Language

The default language can be defined via the OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE environment variable. If this variable is not defined, English will be used as default. The value has the ISO 639-1 format ("de", "en", etc.) and is limited by the list supported languages. This setting can be used to set the default language for notification and invitation emails.

Important developer note: the list of supported languages is at the moment not easy defineable, as it is the minimum intersection of languages shown in the WebUI and languages defined in the ocis code for the use of notifications and userlog. Even more, not all languages where there are translations available on transifex, are available in the WebUI respectively for ocis notifications, and the translation rate for existing languages is partially not that high. You will see therefore quite often English default strings though a supported language may exist and was selected.

The OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE setting impacts the notification and userlog services and the WebUI. Note that translations must exist for all named components to be presented correctly.

• If OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE is not set, the expected behavior is:

  • The notification and userlog services and the WebUI use English by default until a user sets another language in the WebUI via Account -> Language.
  • If a user sets another language in the WebUI in Account -> Language, then the notification and userlog services and WebUI use the language defined by the user. If no translation is found, it falls back to English.

• If OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE is set, the expected behavior is:

  • The notification and userlog services and the WebUI use OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE by default until a user sets another language in the WebUI via Account -> Language.
  • If a user sets another language in the WebUI in Account -> Language, the notification and userlog services and WebUI use the language defined by the user. If no translation is found, it falls back to OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE and then to English.