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 the database in Tld entities, and is
updated by running nomulus commands without having to deploy a new version.
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.
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 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 cronjobsweb.xml-- Configuration of URL paths on the webserverappengine-web.xml-- Overall App Engine settings including number and type of instancescloud-scheduler-tasks.xml-- Configuration of Cloud Scheduler Tasks-
cloud-tasks-queue.xml-- Configuration of Cloud Tasks Queue
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, and task queues, and thus edit
those associated XML files.
The existing codebase is configured for running a full-scale registry with
multiple TLDs. In order to deploy to App Engine, you will either need to
increase your quota
to allow for at least 100 running instances or reduce max-instances in the
backend appengine-web.xml files to 25 or less.
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 accountFor 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.
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.
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 theregistryToolsection. This will make thenomulustool 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
oAuthsection, which defines a parameter calledallowedOauthClientIds, 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.
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, which is backed by the GCP Secret Manager.
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. This allows the codebase to start and run, but of course any actions
that attempt to connect to external services will fail because if the relevant
key is not found in the Secret Manager.
To configure a production registry system, you will need to add the required
keys to the Secret Manager. To do so, you can use the Nomulus tool's
update_keyring_secret command. First, run nomulus -e ${ENV} update_keyring_secret to get the list of all key names (whose meanings should
be obvious); then, for each key to be added or updated, put the data in a file
and run nomulus -e ${ENV} update_keyring_secret --input ${FILE} --keyname ${KEY_NAME}.
Tld entities, which are persisted to the database, 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.
Nomulus requires access to Cloud SQL and thus the necessary configuration must be applied.
You can create a cloud SQL instance using the gcloud command:
$ gcloud sql instances create nomulus --database-version=POSTGRES_17 \
--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 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
Finally, add the database instance names to the keyring. First, get the connection name for the new database:
$ gcloud sql instances describe nomulus | grep connectionName
connectionName: your-project:us-central1:nomulus
Use the update_keyring_secret command to update the SQL_PRIMARY_CONN_NAME
key with the connection name. If you have created a read-replica, update the
SQL_REPLICA_CONN_NAME key with the replica's connection time.
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.
You'll need to enable the SecretManager API in your project.
Use the update_keyring_secret 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_keyring_secret --keyname CLOUD_SQL_PASSWORD \
--input /tmp/server.pass
Repeat the steps for the tools sql password:
$ nomulus -e $ENV update_keyring_secret --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]