Mod Logs

This is meant as a way for subreddits to provide transparency in their moderation.

If you're a moderator and want to enable Mod Logs for your subreddit, take a look at the Moderator Instructions file.

Moderator logs are fetched from the reddit API and stored in a Mongo database. The reddit API only provides logs for the past 120 days and doesn't provide a lot of flexibility in terms of filtering those logs, so we store them ourselves.

Dependencies

You'll need:

• Node 7+
• MongoDB
• Redis

Run yarn install to install the JS dependencies.

Mongo is used to store the moderator logs that we fetch. Redis is used to queue the log fetching and report processing.

Running the app

Development

Run ./run-dev. You can pass any valid docker-compose up arguments to that script, e.g. ./run-dev -d nginx. Make sure the appropriate environment variables are set.

Add the following lines to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 modlogs.local
127.0.0.1 login.modlogs.local

Then you'll be able to access the UI at https://modlogs.local:4241. The server will be running in watch-mode, and UI hot reload will work.

Production

yarn ui:build and yarn server:build to build, then <env vars> yarn server:run to run.

Or just run docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up.

Docker

The app is also dockerized for ease of deployment. There are a few docker images:

• web: runs the API server and serves the UI. be sure to provide the correct env vars (see below)
• worker: queues and processes logs, reports, etc. also needs env vars
• mongo: runs the mongo database
• login: a small OAuth microservice from login-with
• nginx: frontend for the web and login services
• redis: runs the redis server for the worker queue

Make sure to pass the appropriate environment variables into the docker containers when they're run.

Environment variables

variable	default	required by	note
PORT	4245	web	the port that the server will listen on
APP_ID		worker	the app ID given by reddit for API access
APP_SECRET		worker	the app secret given by reddit for API access
REDDIT_USER		worker	the reddit username to authenticate with
REDDIT_PASSWORD		worker	the reddit password to authenticate with
USER_AGENT		worker	the user agent to send with reddit API calls
MONGODB_URI	mongodb://localhost:modlogs	web, worker	the URI of your mongo server
REDIS_URL	redis://localhost	worker	the URI of your redis server
ANALYTICS_KEY		web (during ui:build command only)	the google analytics key
LW_SESSION_SECRET		login	https://github.com/lipp/login-with#mandatory-environment-variables
LW_JWT_SECRET		login	https://github.com/lipp/login-with#mandatory-environment-variables
LW_REDDIT_CLIENTID		login	https://github.com/lipp/login-with#reddit-specific-environment-variables
LW_REDDIT_CLIENTSECRET		login	https://github.com/lipp/login-with#reddit-specific-environment-variables
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID		worker	for AWS glacier backups
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY		worker	for AWS glacier backups
GLACIER_BACKUP_VAULT		worker
GLACIER_BACKUP_REGION		worker
NODE_ENV	production	web
LOG_LEVEL	info	web, worker
ENABLE_METRIC_REPORTING	false	worker	if enabled, logs certain metrics (reddit API hits, reports, etc) to an internal mongo db. disabled by default

Processing subreddits, logs, and reports

Subreddit, log and report processing are queued. There are two components to this: producers and consumers.

The consumers should be run in a worker process which stays running continuously:

<env vars> node build/server/queue/consumers

This will ensure that any new queue items are processed.

The producers should be run periodically. There are currently three producers: one to fetch the list of subreddits, one for the logs and one for PMs which produce moderator reports:

<env vars> node -e "require('build/server/queue/producers/modlogs').run()"
<env vars> node -e "require('build/server/queue/producers/messages').run()"
<env vars> node -e "require('build/server/queue/producers/subreddits').run()"

The env vars marked as required by worker are needed for both.

Tests

Tests are run using jest.

To run the tests, run yarn test for a single run or yarn test:watch to run in watch mode. You can also pass additional options to jest by running yarn test -- --opt1 --opt2 [etc].

The tests rely on a running Mongo DB accessible at either mongodb://localhost:27017 or whatever the environment variable MONGODB_URI is set to.