Calmboard Reporter

A Rails engine that serves encrypted reports about your app for Calmboard.

Usage

Just add this gem to any Rails app, and it will gather metrics on the app, encrypt them and make them available via a request from Calmboard.

As of now, this gem only gathers two metrics:

• the version of Ruby that the app is currently running on
• the version of Rails that the app is

In the future, additional metrics could be added by adding modules to lib/calmboard_reporter/metrics.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "calmboard_reporter", git: 'https://github.com/NeomindLabs/calmboard_reporter.git'

And then run:

$ bundle

Finaly, don't forget to set the encryption key on the app using an environment variable:

export CALMBOARD_REPORTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY="the encryption key"

You can find the key in 1Password.

Encrypted Reporting

This app uses its own unique encryption key to encrypt all apps' metrics reports. You can find the key in 1Password.

Setting Up a New Encryption Key

You can generate a new encryption key by running:

openssl rand -base64 32

After you update it, don't forget to:

• update it in 1Password
• update it in Calmboard's encrypted credentials
• update it as stored in environment variables for any apps using this gem

Decrypting the Metrics

Once this gem is installed and running in an app, Calmboard can then send a GET request to /calmboard_reporter (see lib/calmboard_reporter/engine.rb). The response will be JSON, like this:

{
  "encrypted_metrics" => "[a long encrypted string]"
}

Once you decrypt and parse that long encrypted string value, you'll have a Hash like this:

{
  "rails_version" => "7.1.3.2", 
  "ruby_version" => "3.1.4"
}

To see a working decryption process in detail, see spec/requests/calmboard_reporter_spec.rb.

Why didn't you use ActiveSupport::KeyGenerator and ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor?

I agree, this would have been simpler and more Rails-y! But as it turns out, different versions of Rails use different default encryption settings for the same methods (SHA1 vs SHA256, AEAD mode true vs false, etc). Many of these settings are not easily changeable without monkey patching. This makes it very difficult to ensure that a message encrypted by one Rails version will be decryptable by another Rails version.

Instead, I decided to rely on an explicitly configured implementation of OpenSSL (see: lib/calmboard_reporter/encryption.rb), without any Rails specific methods used.