Tech Radar

Welcome to TechRadar!

TechRadar started with a few aims:

• Share experience with technologies across a community
• Record the technologies used on projects
• Promote a common view of technologies across a community

Designed as a simple Web Application it allows the open exchange of views on technologies either by 'voting' on a technology or by entering a comment based detailing your views/experiences.

Try it now : (Default credentials - username:admin password:letmein)

It allows users to:

• Add technologies that you are interested in and associate with categories and projects
• Users can Comment on the technologies
• Users can Vote on whether they think they should be adopted, trialed or avoided.
• Users with the correct permissions can then set the 'official' status with a rationale for each technology
• Users can indicate that they have used a technology

The implementation is extremely flexible with all values (e.g. status values) changable in the data and via the management interface.

New features

• Users skills tracking - Each user can indicate that they have used a technology
• Technology version information tracked - comments and projects can be linked to a specific version of a tool
• ADFS integration
• License information for technologies

Planned future features

• Dashboard Enhancements

Design

TechRadar is a Web Application developed using NodeJS, Passport, Bootstrap and PostgreSQL.
It consists of two layers:

1. Web Layers
2. API REST Services

The web application calls the API REST services using ajax.

Pre-requisites

Tech Radar is a NodeJS application

• NodeJS
• PostgreSQL database (other databases are available and will probably work with small changes to the schema)

Configuration

The following environment variables can be set

COOKIE_KEY = xxxxxxxxxxx : The secret key to use for cookie encryption - uses an insecure value if not defined

GOOGLE_ID = xxxxxxxxxxx : Google Analytics tracking code. GA is turned off if not defined

To enable Azure AD sign-in, set the following environment variables:

AZURE_IDENTITY_METADATA=https://login.microsoftonline.com/YOUR_TENANT_NAME_OR_ID/.well-known/openid-configuration

AZURE_CLIENT_ID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxx

AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx=

AZURE_RETURN_URL=https://xxxxxxxxxxx.com/auth/openid/return

If these are not defined AD integration is turned off

To learn more about the above values, click here. Additional Azure AD settings can be found in configAzureAD.js

Installation

Installation is as follows:

1. Provision a node environment and PostgreSQL database
2. Define the following environment variables; either by creating a process.env in the root directory or defining standard environment variables
   • DATABASE_URL
3. Deploy code to target environment
4. Run database/runMigrations.js up to create all the required tables
5. Run database/dbtestdata.js to create some test data if required
6. Use npm test to run unit tests.
7. Run node server.js | bunyan to start application

Deploying the code to your preferred NodeJS environment (personally I use OpenShift and Heroku)

Other documentation is located here -> http://gpimblott.github.io/TechRadar/