google-nomulus/docs/configuration.md

Configuration

There are multiple different kinds of configuration that go into getting a working registry system up and running. Broadly speaking, configuration works in two ways -- globally, for the entire sytem, and per-TLD. Global configuration is managed by editing code and deploying a new version, whereas per-TLD configuration is data that lives in Datastore in Registry entities, and is updated by running nomulus commands without having to deploy a new version.

Initial configuration

Here's a checklist of things that need to be configured upon initial installation of the project:

• Create Google Cloud Storage buckets (see the Architecture documentation for more information).
• Modify configuration files ("nomulus-config-*.yaml") for all environments you wish to deploy.

Environments

Before getting into the details of configuration, it's important to note that a lot of configuration is environment-dependent. It is common to see switch statements that operate on the current RegistryEnvironment, and return different values for different environments. This is especially pronounced in the UNITTEST and LOCAL environments, which don't run on App Engine at all. As an example, some timeouts may be long in production and short in unit tests.

See the Architecture documentation for more details on environments as used by Nomulus.

App Engine configuration

App Engine configuration isn't covered in depth in this document as it is thoroughly documented in the App Engine configuration docs. The main files of note that come pre-configured in Nomulus are:

• cron.xml -- Configuration of cronjobs
• web.xml -- Configuration of URL paths on the webserver
• appengine-web.xml -- Overall App Engine settings including number and type of instances
• datastore-indexes.xml -- Configuration of entity indexes in Datastore
• queue.xml -- Configuration of App Engine task queues
• application.xml -- Configuration of the application name and its services

Cron, web, and queue are covered in more detail in the "App Engine architecture" doc, and the rest are covered in the general App Engine documentation.

If you are not writing new code to implement custom features, is unlikely that you will need to make any modifications beyond simple changes to application.xml and appengine-web.xml. If you are writing new features, it's likely you'll need to add cronjobs, URL paths, Datastore indexes, and task queues, and thus edit those associated XML files.

Global configuration

Global configuration is managed through YAML files that are built with and deployed in the app. The full list of config options and their default values can be found in the default-config.yaml file. If you wish to change any of these values, do not edit this file. Instead, edit the environment configuration file named google/registry/config/files/nomulus-config-ENVIRONMENT.yaml, overriding only the options you wish to change. Nomulus ships with blank placeholders for all standard environments.

You will not need to change most of the default settings. Here is the subset of settings that you will need to change for all deployed environments, including development environments. See default-config.yaml for a full description of each option:

appEngine:
  projectId: # Your App Engine project ID
  toolsServiceUrl: https://tools-dot-PROJECT-ID.appspot.com  # Insert your project ID
  isLocal: false  # Causes saved credentials to be used.

gSuite:
  domainName: # Your G Suite domain name
  adminAccountEmailAddress: # An admin login for your G Suite account

For fully-featured production environments that need the full range of features (e.g. RDE, correct contact information on the registrar console, etc.) you will need to specify more settings. The nomulus-config-production-sample.yaml file contains an exhaustive list of all settings to override.

From a code perspective, all configuration settings ultimately come through the RegistryConfig class. This includes a Dagger module called ConfigModule that provides injectable configuration options. While most configuration options can be changed from within the yaml config file, certain derived options may still need to be overriden by changing the code in this module.

OAuth 2 client id configuration

The open source Nomulus release uses OAuth 2 to authenticate and authorize users. This includes the nomulus tool when it connects to the system to execute commands. OAuth must be configured before you can use the nomulus tool to set up the system.

OAuth defines the concept of a client id, which identifies the application which the user wants to authorize. This is so that, when a user clicks in an OAuth permission dialog and grants access to data, they are not granting access to every application on their computer (including potentially malicious ones), but only to the application which they agree needs access. Each environment of the Nomulus system should have its own client id. Multiple installations of the nomulus tool application can share the same client id for the same environment.

There are three steps to configuration.

• Create the client id in App Engine: Go to your project's "Credentials" page in the Developer's Console. Click "Create credentials" and select "OAuth client ID" from the dropdown. In the create credentials window, select an application type of "Desktop app". After creating the client id, copy the client id and client secret which are displayed in the popup window. You may also obtain this information by downloading the json file for the client id.

• Copy the client secret information to the config file: The client secret file contains both the client ID and the client secret. Copy the respective values to the config file for the environment that the credential is created for (e. g. nomulus-config-production.yaml) under the registryTool section. This will make the nomulus tool use this credential to authenticate itself to the system.

• Add the new client id to the configured list of allowed client ids: The configuration files include an oAuth section, which defines a parameter called allowedOauthClientIds, specifying a list of client ids which are permitted to connect. Add the client ID to the list. You will need to rebuild and redeploy the project so that the configuration changes take effect.

Once these steps are taken, the nomulus tool will use a client id which the server is configured to accept, and authentication should succeed. Note that many Nomulus commands also require that the user have App Engine admin privileges, meaning that the user needs to be added as an owner or viewer of the App Engine project.

Sensitive global configuration

Some configuration values, such as PGP private keys, are so sensitive that they should not be written in code as per the configuration methods above, as that would pose too high a risk of them accidentally being leaked, e.g. in a source control mishap. We use a secret store to persist these values in a secure manner, and abstract access to them using the Keyring interface.

The Keyring interface contains methods for all sensitive configuration values, which are primarily credentials used to access various ICANN and ICANN- affiliated services (such as RDE). These values are only needed for real production registries and PDT environments. If you are just playing around with the platform at first, it is OK to put off defining these values until necessary. To that end, a DummyKeyringModule is included that simply provides an InMemoryKeyring populated with dummy values for all secret keys. This allows the codebase to compile and run, but of course any actions that attempt to connect to external services will fail because none of the keys are real.

To configure a production registry system, you will need to either use the KmsKeyring or write your own replacement module using DummyKeyringModule for guidance. Such a module should provide either an instance of InMemoryKeyring or your own custom implementation of Keyring.

In either case, configure the keyring section of the config file with the appropriate parameters. Use an activeKeyring of "KMS" with a project id for KMS to configure accordingly, for example:

keyring:
  activeKeyring: KMS
  kms:
    projectId: acme-registry-keys

Per-TLD configuration

Registry entities, which are persisted to Datastore, are used for per-TLD configuration. They contain any kind of configuration that is specific to a TLD, such as the create/renew price of a domain name, the pricing engine implementation, the DNS writer implementation, whether escrow exports are enabled, the default currency, the reserved label lists, and more. The nomulus update_tld command is used to set all of these options. See the admin tool documentation for more information, as well as the command-line help for the update_tld command. Unlike global configuration above, per-TLD configuration options are stored as data in the running system, and thus do not require code pushes to update.

Cloud SQL Configuration

Nomulus is in the process of being ported to Cloud SQL. As such, parts of the system already require access to Cloud SQL and the necessary configuration must be applied.

Create Postgres Cloud SQL Instance

You can create a cloud SQL instance using the gcloud command:

$ gcloud sql instances create nomulus --database-version=POSTGRES_11 \
   --cpu=1 --memory=4G

Note that for a production instance, you will likely want to be far more generous with both CPU and memory resources.

Now get the connection name for the new database:

$ gcloud sql instances describe nomulus | grep connectionName
connectionName: your-project:us-central1:nomulus

Copy the connection name into your configuration (see below).

Now set the password for the default user:

$ gcloud sql users set-password postgres \
    --instance=nomulus --project=$PROJECT_ID \
    --prompt-for-password

Store this password somewhere secure.

Now create database users for the tool and for the backend. First, you'll need to create a password. This can simply be a sequence of random characters. Write it to the file /tmp/server.pass (we'll use a single password for the two user accounts here, you are encouraged to use different passwords for your production systems). Make sure that this file does not contain a newline after the password. Now create the two user accounts:

$ gcloud sql users create nomulus --instance=nomulus \
  --project=$PROJECT_ID "--password=`cat /tmp/server.pass`"
$ gcloud sql users create tool --instance=nomulus \
  --project=$PROJECT_ID "--password=`cat /tmp/server.pass`"

Now enable access to the Cloud SQL admin APIs:

$ gcloud services enable sqladmin.googleapis.com \
    --project=$PROJECT_ID

Installing the Schema

Google's Nomulus team makes use of Spinnaker-based continuous integration to perform weekly pushes of both the Nomulus software and the SQL database schema. Organizations wishing to use the Nomulus software will likely want to do something similar. However, for purposes of this exercise we will push the schema from the build system.

First, download the Cloud SQL Proxy. This will allow you to connect to your database from a local workstation without a lot of additional configuration.

Create a service account for use with the proxy:

$ gcloud iam service-accounts create sql-proxy \
    --project=$PROJECT_ID \
    --description="Service account for use with Cloud SQL Proxy" \
    --display-name="Cloud SQL Proxy"

Give the service account admin permissions:

$ gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding $PROJECT_ID \
    --member=serviceAccount:sql-proxy@$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
    --role=roles/cloudsql.admin

Create a JSON key for the service account:

$ gcloud iam service-accounts keys create sql-admin.json \
    --project=$PROJECT_ID \
    --iam-account=sql-proxy@$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com

Now start the proxy:

$ PORT=3306   # Use a different value for this if you like.
$ ./cloud_sql_proxy -credential_file=sql-admin.json \
    -instances=$PROJECT_ID:nomulus=tcp:$PORT
2020/07/01 12:11:20 current FDs rlimit set to 32768, wanted limit is 8500. Nothing to do here.
2020/07/01 12:11:20 using credential file for authentication; email=sql-proxy@pproject-id.iam.gserviceaccount.com
2020/07/01 12:11:20 Listening on 127.0.0.1:3306 for project-id:nomulus
2020/07/01 12:11:20 Ready for new connections

Finally, upload the new database schema:

$ ./nom_build :db:flywayMigrate --dbServer=localhost:$PORT \
    --dbName=postgres --dbUser=nomulus --dbPassword=`cat /tmp/server.pass`

Now you'll need to give the "tool" user access to all tables. You can do this either with a locally installed version of PostgreSQL or from the Cloud Shell. From local postgres, first, with your proxy is still running, connect using psql.

$ psql -h localhost -p 3306 postgres nomulus                                                                                                                         ~/w/nom.admin-docs
Password for user nomulus: <enter the password from /tmp/server.pass>
psql (12.2 (Debian 12.2-1+build2), server 11.6)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=>

Enter the following command at the postgres prompt:

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public
TO tool;

From the Google Cloud Console, click the cloud shell icon in the toolbar (the ">_" icon). You should be able to connect to your database with gcloud:

$ gcloud sql connect nomulus --user=nomulus

From this, you should have a postgres prompt and be able to enter the "GRANT" command specified above.

Cloud KMS

You'll need to choose a project to host the KMS keyring. Best practice is to create a separate project with a strict IAM policy. However, you can use your current project when experimenting.

You need to create a KMS keyring in the chosen project. The default keyring name is 'nomulus', though you can override it in the config file.

$ gcloud kms keyrings create "nomulus" --location "global" \
    --project $KEYS_PROJECT_ID

Next, you need to create two keys in the keyring:

$ gcloud kms keys create "cloud-sql-password-string" \
    --project $KEYS_PROJECT_ID \
    --location "global" \
    --keyring "nomulus" \
    --purpose "encryption"

$ gcloud kms keys create "tools-cloud-sql-password-string" \
    --project $KEYS_PROJECT_ID \
    --location "global" \
    --keyring "nomulus" \
    --purpose "encryption"

Install Cloud SQL Passwords in Nomulus Server

Use the update_kms_keyring command to upload the Cloud SQL passwords to the Nomulus server. We'll use the password same set of passwords we specified above when creating database user accounts. These should currently be stored in /tmp/server.pass.

Paste the password for the Registry server user to a file, say /tmp/server.pass. Make sure to avoid any trailing '\n' inserted by the editor.

$ set ENV=alpha
$ nomulus -e $ENV update_kms_keyring --keyname CLOUD_SQL_PASSWORD \
    --input /tmp/server.pass

Repeat the steps for the tools sql password:

$ nomulus -e $ENV update_kms_keyring --keyname TOOLS_CLOUD_SQL_PASSWORD \
    --input /tmp/tools.pass

Use get_keyring_secret command to verify the data you put in:

$ nomulus -e alpha -e alpha get_keyring_secret --keyname CLOUD_SQL_PASSWORD
[your password]
$ nomulus -e alpha -e alpha get_keyring_secret --keyname CLOUD_SQL_PASSWORD
[your password]

The Relevant Parts of the Configuration File

cloudSql:
  jdbcUrl: jdbc:postgresql://google/postgres
  username: nomulus
  instanceConnectionName: THE_NAME_SHOWN_ON_THE_DB_INFO_PAGE

keyring:
  activeKeyring: KMS
  kms:
    projectId: KEYS_PROJECT_ID

registryTool:
  clientId: TOOLS_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID
  clientSecret: TOOLS_OAUTH_SECRET
  username: tool