AppTracky

Introduction

Job application tracking demo app made mostly to:

• Familiarise with OAuth authentication flows on Spring Boot.
• AWS practice (ECS, ECR, IAM, S3, S3 presigning, RDS, SSM Parameter store)
• Try my hands at browser drag-drop APIs

Done

• Authentication flows (APIs / frontend)
  • Basic auth (login, registrartion, forgot password, change password, email validation)
  • Oauth/OIDC (Google login/registration)
  • Federated identity (associating Google account to validated basic auth accounts)
• Frontend
  • Layout scaffolding
  • Authentication related things
• Drag-and-drop kanban board for applications and APIs
• Presigned urls S3 uploads for PDF resumes
• Daily application report emails, user validation emails, reset password emails with AWS SES
• AWS SSM Parameter Store integration for OAuth/RDS secrets
• Containerize the backend for easier development, and ECS deployment
• Setup ECS task defs, cluster, S3 bucket policies, IAM for GH actions
• Build and deploy image to ECS, and frontend to S3 automatically with GH actions

TBD

• ($$) (Maybe) HTTPs and domains for S3 frontend and ALB to front ECS (instead of dynamic public IP)
• (Maybe) CloudFormation-ify everything AWS related

Implementation Overview

Backend & Authentication/Authorization

• The core backend REST API is built with Spring Boot & Hibernate.
• Spring Security abstractions are heavily for Authentication. Both basic + oauth flows ultimately result in the issuing of a JWT used for endpoint authentication and authorization. Federated identity is done on the basis of user emails, verified via OIDC.
• Registration/forgot password emails are sent using AWS SES, and user resume uploads using S3.
• RDS/OAuth secrets are retrieved from AWS SSM parameter store.

The frontend is a simple Vue app built on Vuetify + Vite.

Infrastructure

All resources have been taken down to save $$.

• A S3 bucket hosts the frontend.
• Another S3 bucket hosts user uploaded resumes. Authentication (GET/PUT) is done via presigned URLs generated on the backend.
• The backend is contanerized, supporting docker compose for easy development with a postgres container.
  Production deployment utilises AWS ECS (Fargate launch type) and RDS for the database.
  • Fargate tasks also have the option of generating dynamic public IPs, which is what's used to connect the frontend to backend.
• For simplicity, everything uses the default VPC and subnet.
• There is no HTTPs and/or custom domains setup to save on $$ since this a demo project.
• There is also a Github Actions workflow to:
  1. ./gradlew build and containerize the backend image, and upload it into AWS ECR.
  2. Build and frontend app and upload it into AWS S3

Screenshots