Skip to content

Configuring Shared Services

In general, a shared service should be installed by using the UI or API directly once its bundle has been registered on the system.

Deploy & configure V2 Nexus service (hosted on VM)

Caution

Before deploying the V2 Nexus service, you will need workspaces of version 0.3.2 or above due to a dependency on a DNS zone link for the workspace(s) to connect to the Nexus VM.

Before deploying the Nexus shared service, you need to make sure that it will have access to a certificate to configure serving secure proxies. By default, the Nexus service will serve proxies from https://nexus-{TRE_ID}.{LOCATION}.cloudapp.azure.com/, and thus it requires a certificate that validates ownership of this domain to use for SSL.

You can use the Certs Shared Service to set one up by following these steps:

  1. Run the below commands in your terminal to build, publish and register the certs bundle:

    make bundle-build DIR=./templates/shared_services/certs
    make bundle-publish DIR=./templates/shared_services/certs
    make bundle-register DIR=./templates/shared_services/certs BUNDLE_TYPE=shared_service
    
  2. Navigate to the Swagger UI for your TRE API at https://<azure_tre_fqdn>/api/docs, and authenticate if you haven't already by clicking Authorize.

  3. Click Try it out on the POST /api/shared-services operation, and paste the following to deploy the certs service:

    {
      "templateName": "tre-shared-service-certs",
      "properties": {
        "display_name": "Nexus cert",
        "description": "Generate/renew ssl cert for Nexus shared service",
        "domain_prefix": "nexus",
        "cert_name": "nexus-ssl"
      }
    }
    

Caution

If you have KeyVault Purge Protection enabled and are re-deploying your environment using the same cert_name, you may encounter this: Status=409 Code=\"Conflict\" Message=\"Certificate nexus-ssl is currently in a deleted but recoverable state. You need to either manually recover the certificate or purge it before redeploying.

Once deployed, the certs service will use Letsencrypt to generate a certificate for the specified domain prefix followed by -{TRE_ID}.{LOCATION}.cloudapp.azure.com, so in our case, having entered nexus, this will be nexus-{TRE_ID}.{LOCATION}.cloudapp.azure.com, which will be the public domain for our Nexus service.

You can verify whether this has been successful by navigating to your core keyvault (kv-{TRE_ID}) and looking for a certificate called nexus-ssl (or whatever you called it).

After verifying the certificate has been generated, you can deploy Nexus:

  1. Run the below commands in your terminal to build, publish and register the Nexus shared service bundle:

    make bundle-build DIR=./templates/shared_services/sonatype-nexus-vm
    make bundle-publish DIR=./templates/shared_services/sonatype-nexus-vm
    make bundle-register DIR=./templates/shared_services/sonatype-nexus-vm BUNDLE_TYPE=shared_service
    
  2. Navigate to the Swagger UI for your TRE API at https://<azure_tre_fqdn>/api/docs, and authenticate if you haven't already by clicking Authorize.

  3. Click Try it out on the POST /api/shared-services operation, and paste the following to deploy the Nexus shared service:

    {
      "templateName": "tre-shared-service-sonatype-nexus",
      "properties": {
        "display_name": "Nexus",
        "description": "Proxy public repositories with Nexus",
        "ssl_cert_name": "nexus-ssl"
      }
    }
    

Tip

If you called your cert something different in the certs shared service step, make sure that is reflected above.

This will deploy the infrastructure required for Nexus, then start the service and configure it with the repository configurations located in the ./templates/shared_services/sonatype-nexus-vm/scripts/nexus_repos_config folder. It will also set up HTTPS using the certificate you generated in the previous section, so proxies can be served at https://nexus-{TRE_ID}.{LOCATION}.cloudapp.azure.com.

You can optionally go to the Nexus web interface by visiting https://nexus-{TRE_ID}.{LOCATION}.cloudapp.azure.com/ in the jumpbox and signing in with the username admin and the password secret located in your core keyvault, with the key nexus-admin-password. Here you should be able to see all of the configured repositories and you can use the UI to manage settings etc.

Just bear in mind that if this service is redeployed any changes made in the Nexus UI won't be persisted. If you wish to permanently add new repositories or alter existing ones, modify the JSON files within the ./nexus_repos_config directory and redeploy.

Migrate from an existing V1 Nexus service (hosted on App Service)

Once you've created the new V2 (VM-based) Nexus service by following the previous section, you can migrate from the V1 Nexus service by following these steps:

  1. Identify any existing Guacamole user resources that are using the old proxy URL (https://nexus-{TRE_ID}.azurewebsites.net/). These will be any VMs with bundle versions < 0.3.2.

  2. These will need to be either re-deployed with the new template versions 0.3.2 or later and specifying an additional template parameter "nexus_version" with the value of "V2", or manually have their proxy URLs updated by remoting into the VMs and updating the various configuration files of required package managers with the new URL (https://nexus-{TRE_ID}.{LOCATION}.cloudapp.azure.com/).

    1. For example, pip will need the index, index-url and trusted-host values in the global pip.conf file to be modified to use the new URL.
  3. Once you've confirmed there are no dependencies on the old Nexus shared service, you can delete it using the API.

Upgrade notes

The new V2 Nexus shared service can be located in the ./templates/shared_services/sonatype-nexus-vm directory, with the bundle name tre-shared-service-sonatype-nexus, which is now hosted using a VM to enable additional configuration required for proxying certain repositories.

This has been created as a separate service as the domain name exposed for proxies will be different to the one used by the original Nexus service and thus will break any user resources configured with the old proxy URL.

The original Nexus service that runs on App Service (located in ./templates/shared_services/sonatype-nexus) has the bundle name tre-shared-service-nexus so can co-exist with the new VM-based shared service to enable smoother upgrading of existing resources.

Renewing certificates for Nexus

The Nexus V2 service checks Keyvault regularly for the latest certificate matching the name you passed on deploy (nexus-ssl by default).

When approaching expiry, you can either provide an updated certificate if you brought your own, or if you used the certs shared service to generate one, just call the renew custom action on that service. This will generate a new certificate and persist it to the Keyvault.

Configure Gitea repositories

Note : This is a Gitea shared service which will be accessible from all workspaces intended for mirroring external Git repositories. A Gitea workspace service can also be deployed per workspace to enable Gitea to be used within a specific workspace.

By default, this Gitea instance does not have any repositories configured. You can add repositories to Gitea either by using the command line or by using the Gitea web interface.

Command Line

Make sure you run the following commands using git bash and set your current directory as C:/AzureTRE.

  1. On the jumbox, run: ./templates/workspace_services/gitea/gitea_migrate_repo.sh -t <tre_id> -g <URL_of_github_repo_to_migrate>
  2. If you have issues with token or token doesn't work, you can reset the token by setting it's value to null in Key Vault: az keyvault secret set --name gitea-<tre-id>-admin-token --vault-name kv-<tre-id> --value null

Gitea Web Interface

  1. on the jumbox, open Edge and go to: https://gitea-<TRE_ID>.azurewebsites.net/
  2. Authenticate yourself using username giteaadmin and the secret <gitea-TRE_ID-administrator-password> stored in the keyvault,
  3. Add the repository of your choice

Verify can access the mirrored repository

From a virtual machine within a workspace: - Command line: git clone https://gitea-<TRE_ID>.azurewebsites.net/giteaadmin/<NameOfrepository> - Gitea Web Interface: https://gitea-<TRE_ID>.azurewebsites.net/

Next steps