hedgedoc/docs/content/dev/config.md

Config

The configuration of HedgeDoc is handled entirely by environment variables. Most of these variables are prefixed with HD_ (for HedgeDoc).

Configuring HedgeDoc for development

NestJS - the framework we use - is reading the variables from the environment and also from the .env file in the root of the project. To make it easy to get the project started we included an example .env file in the root of this project called .env.example.

How the config code works

The config of HedgeDoc is split up into eight different modules:

app.config.ts

General configuration of the app

auth.config.ts

Which authentication providers are available and which options are set

csp.config.ts

Configuration for Content Security Policy

customization.config.ts

Config to customize the instance and set instance specific links

database.config.ts

Which database should be used

external-services.config.ts

Which external services are activated and where can they be called

hsts.config.ts

Configuration for HTTP Strict-Transport-Security

media.config.ts

Where media files are being stored

Each of those files (except auth.config.ts which is discussed later) consists of three parts:

1. An interface
2. A Joi schema
3. A default export

Interface

The interface just describes which options the configuration has and how the rest of HedgeDoc can use them. All enums that are used in here are put in their own files with the extension .enum.ts.

Joi Schema

We use Joi to validate each provided configuration to make sure the configuration of the user is sound and provides helpful error messages otherwise.

The most important part here is that each value ends with .label(). This names the environment variable that corresponds to each config option. It's very important that each config option is assigned the correct label to have meaningful error messages that benefit the user.

Everything else about how Joi works and how you should write schemas can be read in their documentation.

A default export

The default exports are used by NestJS to provide the values to the rest of the application. We mostly do four things here:

1. Populate the config interface with environment variables, creating the config object.
2. Validate the config object against the Joi schema.
3. Polish the error messages from Joi and present them to the user (if any occur).
4. Return the validated config object.

How auth.config.ts works

Because it's possible to configure some authentication providers multiple times (e.g. multiple LDAPs or GitLabs), we use user defined environment variable names. With the user defined names it's not possible to put the correct labels in the schema or build the config objects as we do in every other file.

Therefore, we have two big extra steps in the default export:

1. To populate the config object we have some code at the top of the default export to gather all configured variables into arrays.
2. The error messages are piped into the util method replaceAuthErrorsWithEnvironmentVariables. This replaces the error messages of the form gitlab[0].providerName with HD_AUTH_GITLAB_<nameOfFirstGitlab>_PROVIDER_NAME. For this the util function gets the error, the name of the config option (e.g 'gitlab'), the approriate prefix (e.g. 'HD_AUTH_GITLAB_'), and an array of the user defined names.

Mocks

Some config files also have a .mock.ts file which defines the configuration for the e2e tests. Those files just contain the default export and return the mock config object.