Frontend

The frontend service translates various owncloud related HTTP APIs to CS3 requests.

• Endpoints Overview
  • appprovider
  • archiver
  • datagateway
  • ocs
    • Event Handler
  • Sharing
• Scalability
• Define Read-Only Attributes
• Caching
  • Auto-Accept Shares
• Passwords
  • The Password Policy
  • The Password Policy Capability
  • Password Enforcement for all Public Links
  • Password Enforcement for Writeable Public Links
• Example Yaml Config

Currently, the frontend service handles requests for three functionalities, which are appprovider, archiver, datagateway and ocs.

The appprovider endpoint, by default /app, forwards HTTP requests to the CS3 App Registry API

The archiver endpoint, by default /archiver, implements zip and tar download for collections of files. It will internally use the CS3 API to initiate downloads and then stream the individual files as part of a compressed file.

The datagateway endpoint, by default /data, forwards file up- and download requests to the correct CS3 data provider. OCIS starts a dataprovider as part of the storage-* services. The routing happens based on the JWT that was created by a storage provider in response to an InitiateFileDownload or InitiateFileUpload request.

The ocs endpoint, by default /ocs, implements the ownCloud 10 Open Collaboration Services API by translating it into CS3 API requests. It can handle users, groups, capabilities and also implements the files sharing functionality on top of CS3. The /ocs/v[12].php/cloud/user/signing-key is currently handled by the dedicated ocs service.

The frontend service contains an eventhandler for handling ocs related events. As of now, it only listens to the ShareCreated event.

Aggregating share information is one of the most time consuming operations in OCIS. The service fetches a list of either received or created shares and has to stat every resource individually. While stats are fast, the default behavior scales linearly with the number of shares.

To save network trips the sharing implementation can cache the stat requests with an in memory cache or in Redis. It will shorten the response time by the network round-trip overhead at the cost of the API only eventually being updated.

Setting FRONTEND_OCS_RESOURCE_INFO_CACHE_TTL=60 would cache the stat info for 60 seconds. Increasing this value makes sense for large deployments with thousands of active users that keep the cache up to date. Low frequency usage scenarios should not expect a noticeable improvement.

While the frontend service does not persist any data, it does cache information about files and filesystem (Stat()) responses and user information. Therefore, multiple instances of this service can be spawned in a bigger deployment like when using container orchestration with Kubernetes, when configuring FRONTEND_OCS_RESOURCE_INFO_CACHE_STORE and the related config options.

A lot of user management is made via the standardized libregraph API. Depending on how the system is configured, there might be some user attributes that an ocis instance admin can’t change because of properties coming from an external LDAP server, or similar. This can be the case when the ocis admin is not the LDAP admin. To ease life for admins, there are hints as capabilites telling the frontend which attributes are read-only to enable a different optical representation like being grayed out. To configure these hints, use the environment variable FRONTEND_READONLY_USER_ATTRIBUTES, which takes a comma separated list of attributes, see the envvar for supported values.

You can find more details regarding available attributes at the libre-graph-api openapi-spec and on owncloud.dev.

The frontend service can use a configured store via FRONTEND_OCS_STAT_CACHE_STORE. Possible stores are:

• memory: Basic in-memory store and the default.
• redis-sentinel: Stores data in a configured Redis Sentinel cluster.
• nats-js-kv: Stores data using key-value-store feature of nats jetstream
• noop: Stores nothing. Useful for testing. Not recommended in production environments.
• ocmem: Advanced in-memory store allowing max size. (deprecated)
• redis: Stores data in a configured Redis cluster. (deprecated)
• etcd: Stores data in a configured etcd cluster. (deprecated)
• nats-js: Stores data using object-store feature of nats jetstream (deprecated)

Other store types may work but are not supported currently.

Note: The service can only be scaled if not using memory store and the stores are configured identically over all instances!

Note that if you have used one of the deprecated stores, you should reconfigure to one of the supported ones as the deprecated stores will be removed in a later version.

Store specific notes:

• When using redis-sentinel, the Redis master to use is configured via e.g. OCIS_CACHE_STORE_NODES in the form of <sentinel-host>:<sentinel-port>/<redis-master> like 10.10.0.200:26379/mymaster.
• When using nats-js-kv it is recommended to set OCIS_CACHE_STORE_NODES to the same value as OCIS_EVENTS_ENDPOINT. That way the cache uses the same nats instance as the event bus.
• When using the nats-js-kv store, it is possible to set OCIS_CACHE_DISABLE_PERSISTENCE to instruct nats to not persist cache data on disc.

When setting the FRONTEND_AUTO_ACCEPT_SHARES to true, all incoming shares will be accepted automatically. Users can overwrite this setting individually in their profile.

Note that the password policy currently impacts only public link password validation.

In Infinite Scale, the password policy is always enabled because the max-length restriction is always applying and should be taken into account by the clients.

With the password policy, mandatory criteria for the password can be defined via the environment variables listed below.

Generally, a password can contain any UTF-8 characters, however some characters are regarded as special since they are not used in ordinary texts. Which characters should be treated as special is defined by “The OWASP® Foundation” password-special-characters (between double quotes): " !"#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?@[]^_`{|}~"

The validation against the banned passwords list can be configured via a text file with words separated by new lines. If a user tries to set a password listed in the banned passwords list, the password can not be used (is invalid) even if the other mandatory criteria are passed. The admin can define the path of the banned passwords list file. If the file doesn’t exist in a location, Infinite Scale tries to load a file from the OCIS_CONFIG_DIR/OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_BANNED_PASSWORDS_LIST. An option will be enabled when the file has been loaded successfully.

Following environment variables can be set to define the password policy behaviour:

• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_DISABLED Disable the password policy
• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_MIN_CHARACTERS Define the minimum password length.
• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_MIN_LOWERCASE_CHARACTERS Define the minimum number of uppercase letters.
• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_MIN_UPPERCASE_CHARACTERS Define the minimum number of lowercase letters.
• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_MIN_DIGITS Define the minimum number of digits.
• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_MIN_SPECIAL_CHARACTERS Define the minimum number of special characters.
• OCIS_PASSWORD_POLICY_BANNED_PASSWORDS_LIST Path to the ‘banned passwords list’ file.

These variables are global ocis variables because they are used not only in the frontend service, but also in the sharing service.

Note that a password can have a maximum length of 72 bytes. Depending on the alphabet used, a character is encoded by 1 to 4 bytes, defining the maximum length of a password indirectly. While US-ASCII will only need one byte, Latin alphabets and also Greek or Cyrillic ones need two bytes. Three bytes are needed for characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean etc.

The capabilities endpoint (e.g. https://ocis.test/ocs/v1.php/cloud/capabilities?format=json) gives you following capabilities which are relevant for the password policy:

{
  "ocs": {
    "data": {
      "capabilities": {
        "password_policy": {
          "min_characters": 10,
          "max_characters": 72,
          "min_lowercase_characters": 1,
          "min_uppercase_characters": 2,
          "min_digits": 1,
          "min_special_characters": 1
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For public accessible shares, independent if read only or writable, a password is enforced. To change this requirement, set the following environment variable to false:

OCIS_SHARING_PUBLIC_SHARE_MUST_HAVE_PASSWORD

For public accessible writable shares, a password can be enforced. To change the current setting, set the following environment variable to true:

OCIS_SHARING_PUBLIC_WRITEABLE_SHARE_MUST_HAVE_PASSWORD

Note that changing this environment variable only makes sense if
OCIS_SHARING_PUBLIC_SHARE_MUST_HAVE_PASSWORD
is set to false.

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# Autogenerated
# Filename: frontend-config-example.yaml

tracing:
  enabled: false
  type: ""
  endpoint: ""
  collector: ""
log:
  level: ""
  pretty: false
  color: false
  file: ""
debug:
  addr: 127.0.0.1:9141
  token: ""
  pprof: false
  zpages: false
http:
  addr: 127.0.0.1:9140
  protocol: tcp
  prefix: ""
  cors:
    allow_origins:
    - https://localhost:9200
    allow_methods:
    - OPTIONS
    - HEAD
    - GET
    - PUT
    - POST
    - PATCH
    - DELETE
    - MKCOL
    - PROPFIND
    - PROPPATCH
    - MOVE
    - COPY
    - REPORT
    - SEARCH
    allow_headers:
    - Origin
    - Accept
    - Content-Type
    - Depth
    - Authorization
    - Ocs-Apirequest
    - If-None-Match
    - If-Match
    - Destination
    - Overwrite
    - X-Request-Id
    - X-Requested-With
    - Tus-Resumable
    - Tus-Checksum-Algorithm
    - Upload-Concat
    - Upload-Length
    - Upload-Metadata
    - Upload-Defer-Length
    - Upload-Expires
    - Upload-Checksum
    - Upload-Offset
    - X-HTTP-Method-Override
    - Cache-Control
    allow_credentials: false
transfer_secret: ""
token_manager:
  jwt_secret: ""
reva:
  address: com.owncloud.api.gateway
  tls:
    mode: ""
    cacert: ""
machine_auth_api_key: ""
skip_user_groups_in_token: false
enable_favorites: false
max_quota: 0
upload_max_chunk_size: 10000000
upload_http_method_override: ""
default_upload_protocol: tus
enable_federated_sharing_incoming: false
enable_federated_sharing_outgoing: false
search_min_length: 3
edition: Community
disable_sse: false
default_link_permissions: 1
public_url: https://localhost:9200
app_handler:
  insecure: false
archiver:
  max_num_files: 10000
  max_size: 1073741824
  insecure: false
data_gateway:
  prefix: data
ocs:
  prefix: ocs
  share_prefix: /Shares
  home_namespace: /users/{{.Id.OpaqueId}}
  additional_info_attribute: '{{.Mail}}'
  stat_cache_type: memory
  stat_cache_nodes:
  - 127.0.0.1:9233
  stat_cache_database: cache-stat
  stat_cache_table: ""
  stat_cache_ttl: 5m0s
  stat_cache_size: 0
  stat_cache_disable_persistence: false
  stat_cache_auth_username: ""
  stat_cache_auth_password: ""
  enable_denials: false
  list_ocm_shares: true
  public_sharing_share_must_have_password: true
  public_sharing_writeableshare_must_have_password: false
  include_ocm_sharees: false
  show_email_in_results: false
checksums:
  supported_types:
  - sha1
  - md5
  - adler32
  preferred_upload_type: sha1
read_only_user_attributes: []
ldap_server_write_enabled: true
full_text_search: false
middleware:
  auth:
    credentials_by_user_agent: {}
events:
  endpoint: 127.0.0.1:9233
  cluster: ocis-cluster
  tls_insecure: false
  tls_root_ca_certificate: ""
  enable_tls: false
  username: ""
  password: ""
grpc_client_tls: null
auto_accept_shares: true
service_account:
  service_account_id: ""
  service_account_secret: ""
password_policy:
  min_characters: 8
  min_lowercase_characters: 1
  min_uppercase_characters: 1
  min_digits: 1
  min_special_characters: 1
  banned_passwords_list: ""