Aurora

Aurora is a Django web application that can receive, virus check and validate transfers of digital archival records, and allows archivists to appraise and accession those records.

Aurora is part of Project Electron, an initiative to build sustainable, open and user-centered infrastructure for the archival management of digital records at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Installation

1. Install git and Docker
2. Download or clone this repository

$ git clone https://github.com/RockefellerArchiveCenter/aurora.git

3. Remove the default OAuth Provider as detailed in the authentication section below.
4. Build and run Aurora. The initial build may take some time, so be patient!

$ cd aurora
$ docker-compose up

5. Once this process has completed, Aurora is available in your web browser at http://localhost:8000.
6. Log in using one of the default user accounts (see User accounts below).

Sample Data

If desired, you can import a set of sample bags (not all of which are valid) by running the import_sample_data.sh script.

Open up a new terminal window and navigate to the root of the application, then run

$ docker-compose exec web import_sample_data

Transferring Your Own Bags

If you'd like to transfer your own bags, note that bags must be serialized as either a TAR (compressed or uncompressed) or ZIP file.

If you'er using S3 storage (see Transferring digital records), you'll need to upload a bag to an S3 bucket configured as an upload bucket for one of your organizations.

If you're using local storage you can then transfer those bags by SFTPing them into the local container using the credentials below:

• Protocol: SFTP
• Host name: localhost
• Port number: 22
• Username: A username associated with an existing user account in Aurora (see below for default accounts)
• Password: The password associated with the user account above

Data Persistence

The Docker container is currently configured to persist the MySQL database in local storage. This means that when you shut down the container using docker-compose down all the data in the application will still be there the next time you run docker-compose up. If you want to wipe out the database at shut down, simply run docker-compose down -v.

Authentication

Disabling OAuth Provider

By default, Aurora is configured to use Amazon Cognito as an OAuth provider for authentication.

If you don't want to use this method of authentication, it is possible to use the built-in local Django authentication layer instead. In order to do this you will need to make a few changes:

1. Update the MIDDLEWARE configs in settings.py:

• Comment out bag_transfer.middleware.cognito.CognitoMiddleware.
• Enable bag_transfer.middleware.jwt.AuthenticationMiddlewareJWT.

2. Ensure that the COGNITO_USE config value is set to False.

User accounts

By default, Aurora comes with five user accounts:

Username	Password	User Role
admin	password	System Administrator
donor	password	Read Only User
appraiser	password	Appraisal Archivist
accessioner	password	Accessioning Archivist
manager	password	Managing Archivist

See the Aurora User Documentation for more information about permissions associated with each user role.

Note that in the Docker container, all user passwords are reset to "password" each time the container is restarted. This behavior can be changed by editing setup_objects.py, but note that this change will impact your ability to SFTP bags into the container.

Transferring digital records

Transfer Validation

At regularly scheduled intervals, Aurora scans the upload targets for each active organization. Any new files or directories in the upload target are added to Aurora's processing queue.

At a high level, transfers are processed as follows:

• Transfers are checked to ensure they have a valid filename, in other words that the top-level directory (for unserialized bags) or filename (for serialized bags) does not contain illegal characters.
• Transfers are checked for viruses.
• Transfers are checked to ensure they have only one top-level directory.
• Size of transfers is checked to ensure it doesn't exceed TRANSFER_FILESIZE_MAX.
• Transfers are validated against the BagIt specification using bagit-python.
• Transfers are validated against the BagIt Profile specified in their bag-info.txt file using bagit-profiles-validator.
• Relevant PREMIS rights statements are assigned to transfers (see Organization Management section for details).

Disabling S3 Storage

By default, Aurora is configured to use Amazon S3 to store uploaded and validated transfers.

If you don't want to use S3, you can configure Aurora to use the local file system instead:

1. Set the S3_USE config value to False.
2. Ensure that the TRANSFER_UPLOADS_ROOT is properly set and that the filepath specified there exists and is writable by Aurora.s

API

Aurora comes with a RESTful API, built using the Django Rest Framework. In addition to interacting with the API via your favorite command-line client, you can also use the browsable API interface available in the application.

Authentication

Using OAuth

In order to make requests against the Aurora API when using an OAuth provider, you will first need to add an application to your OAuth provider, then make a request against the provider's token endpoint using the client credentials flow. The token returned from the provider should then be attached as a Bearer token to requests.

The ElectronBonder library contains code which demonstrates this flow (see the authorize_oauth method in /electronbonder/client.py).

Using local authentication

If OAuth is disabled (see above), Aurora can use JSON Web Tokens for validation. As with all token-based authentication, you should ensure the application is only available over SSL/TLS in order to avoid token tampering and replay attacks.

To get your token, send a POST request to the /get-token/ endpoint, passing your username and password:

$ curl -X POST -d "username=admin&password=password123" http://localhost:8000/api/get-token/

Your token will be returned in the response. You can then use the token in requests such as:

$ curl -H "Authorization: JWT <your_token>" http://localhost:8000/api/orgs/1/

In a production environment, successfully authenticating against this endpoint may require setting Apache's WSGIPassAuthorization to On.

The ElectronBonder library contains code which demonstrates this flow (see the authorize method in /electronbonder/client.py).

Django Admin Configuration

Aurora comes with the default Django admin site. Only users with superuser privileges are able to view this interface, which can be accessed by clicking on the profile menu and selecting "Administration".

In addition to allowing for the manual creation and deletion of certain objects, this interface also allows authorized users to edit system values which are used by the application, including the human-readable strings associated with Bag Log Codes. Care should be taken when making changes in the Django admin interface, particularly the creation or deletion of objects, since they can have unintended consequences.

Contributing

Aurora is an open source project and we welcome contributions! If you want to fix a bug, or have an idea of how to enhance the application, the process looks like this:

1. File an issue in this repository. This will provide a location to discuss proposed implementations of fixes or enhancements, and can then be tied to a subsequent pull request.
2. If you have an idea of how to fix the bug (or make the improvements), fork the repository and work in your own branch. When you are done, push the branch back to this repository and set up a pull request. Automated unit tests are run on all pull requests. Any new code should have unit test coverage, documentation (if necessary), and should conform to the Python PEP8 style guidelines.
3. After some back and forth between you and core committers (or individuals who have privileges to commit to the base branch of this repository), your code will probably be merged, perhaps with some minor changes.

This repository contains a configuration file for git pre-commit hooks which help ensure that code is linted before it is checked into version control. It is strongly recommended that you install these hooks locally by installing pre-commit and running pre-commit install.

License

Aurora is released under an MIT License.