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Notification

Abstract

The notification service is responsible for sending emails to users informing them about events that happened. To do this, it hooks into the event system and listens for certain events that the users need to be informed about.

Table of Contents

Email Notification Templates

The notifications service has embedded email text and html body templates.

Email templates can use the placeholders {{ .Greeting }}, {{ .MessageBody }} and {{ .CallToAction }} which are replaced with translations when sent, see the Translations section for more details. Though the email subject is also part of translations, it has no placeholder as it is a mandatory email component.

Depending on the email purpose, placeholders will contain different strings. An individual translatable string is available for each purpose, finally resolved by the placeholder. The embedded templates are available for all deployment scenarios.

template
  placeholders
    translated strings <-- source strings <-- purpose
final output

In addition, the notifications service supports custom templates. Custom email templates take precedence over the embedded ones. If a custom email template exists, the embedded templates are not used. To configure custom email templates, the NOTIFICATIONS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH environment variable needs to point to a base folder that will contain the email templates and follow the templates subfolder hierarchy.This path must be available from all instances of the notifications service, a shared storage is recommended.

{NOTIFICATIONS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH}/templates/text/email.text.tmpl
{NOTIFICATIONS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH}/templates/html/email.html.tmpl
{NOTIFICATIONS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH}/templates/html/img/

The source templates provided by ocis you can derive from are located in the following base folder https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/tree/master/services/notifications/pkg/email/templates with subfolders templates/text and templates/html.

Templates subfolder hierarchy 

templates
│
└───html
│   │   email.html.tmpl
│   │
│   └───img
│       │   logo-mail.gif
│
└───text
    │   email.text.tmpl

Custom email templates referenced via NOTIFICATIONS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH must also be located in subfolder templates/text and templates/html and must have the same names as the embedded templates. It is important that the names of these files and folders match the embedded ones. The templates/html subfolder contains a default HTML template provided by ocis. When using a custom HTML template, hosted images can either be linked with standard HTML code like <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owncloud/core/master/core/img/logo-mail.gif" alt="logo-mail"/> or embedded as a CID source <img src="cid:logo-mail.gif" alt="logo-mail"/>. In the latter case, image files must be located in the templates/html/img subfolder. Supported embedded image types are png, jpeg, and gif. Consider that embedding images via a CID resource may not be fully supported in all email web clients.

Translations

The notifications service has embedded translations sourced via transifex to provide a basic set of translated languages. These embedded translations are available for all deployment scenarios.

In addition, the service supports custom translations, though it is currently not possible to just add custom translations to embedded ones. If custom translations are configured, the embedded ones are not used. To configure custom translations, the NOTIFICATIONS_TRANSLATION_PATH environment variable needs to point to a base folder that will contain the translation files. This path must be available from all instances of the notifications service, a shared storage is recommended. Translation files must be of type .po or .mo. For each language, the filename needs to be notifications.po (or notifications.mo) and stored in a folder structure defining the language code. In general the path/name pattern for a translation file needs to be:

{NOTIFICATIONS_TRANSLATION_PATH}/{language-code}/LC_MESSAGES/notifications.po

The language code pattern is composed of language[_territory] where language is the base language and _territory is optional and defines a country.

For example, for the language de, one needs to place the corresponding translation files to {NOTIFICATIONS_TRANSLATION_PATH}/de/LC_MESSAGES/notifications.po.

Important: For the time being, the embedded ownCloud Web frontend only supports the main language code but does not handle any territory. When strings are available in the language code language_territory, the web frontend does not see it as it only requests language. In consequence, any translations made must exist in the requested language to avoid a fallback to the default.

Translation Rules

  • If a requested language code is not available, the service tries to fall back to the base language if available. For example, if the requested language-code de_DE is not available, the service tries to fall back to translations in the de folder.
  • If the base language de is also not available, the service falls back to the system’s default English (en), which is the source of the texts provided by the code.

Default Language

The default language can be defined via the OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE environment variable. See the settings service for a detailed description.

Example Yaml Config 

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

tracing:
  enabled: false
  type: ""
  endpoint: ""
  collector: ""
log:
  level: ""
  pretty: false
  color: false
  file: ""
debug:
  addr: 127.0.0.1:9174
  token: ""
  pprof: false
  zpages: false
ocis_url: https://localhost:9200
notifications:
  SMTP:
    smtp_host: ""
    smtp_port: 0
    smtp_sender: ""
    smtp_username: ""
    smtp_password: ""
    insecure: false
    smtp_authentication: ""
    smtp_encryption: none
  events:
    endpoint: 127.0.0.1:9233
    cluster: ocis-cluster
    tls_insecure: false
    tls_root_ca_certificate: ""
    enable_tls: false
    username: ""
    password: ""
  email_template_path: ""
  translation_path: ""
  default_language: ""
  reva_gateway: com.owncloud.api.gateway
  grpc_client_tls: null
grpc_client_tls:
  mode: ""
  cacert: ""
service_account:
  service_account_id: ""
  service_account_secret: ""

Environment Variables

Name Type Default Value Description
OCIS_TRACING_ENABLED
NOTIFICATIONS_TRACING_ENABLED		 bool false Activates tracing.
OCIS_TRACING_TYPE
NOTIFICATIONS_TRACING_TYPE		 string The type of tracing. Defaults to ‘’, which is the same as ‘jaeger’. Allowed tracing types are ‘jaeger’ and ’’ as of now.
OCIS_TRACING_ENDPOINT
NOTIFICATIONS_TRACING_ENDPOINT		 string The endpoint of the tracing agent.
OCIS_TRACING_COLLECTOR
NOTIFICATIONS_TRACING_COLLECTOR		 string The HTTP endpoint for sending spans directly to a collector, i.e. http://jaeger-collector:14268/api/traces. Only used if the tracing endpoint is unset.
OCIS_LOG_LEVEL
NOTIFICATIONS_LOG_LEVEL		 string The log level. Valid values are: ‘panic’, ‘fatal’, ’error’, ‘warn’, ‘info’, ‘debug’, ’trace’.
OCIS_LOG_PRETTY
NOTIFICATIONS_LOG_PRETTY		 bool false Activates pretty log output.
OCIS_LOG_COLOR
NOTIFICATIONS_LOG_COLOR		 bool false Activates colorized log output.
OCIS_LOG_FILE
NOTIFICATIONS_LOG_FILE		 string The path to the log file. Activates logging to this file if set.
NOTIFICATIONS_DEBUG_ADDR string 127.0.0.1:9174 Bind address of the debug server, where metrics, health, config and debug endpoints will be exposed.
NOTIFICATIONS_DEBUG_TOKEN string Token to secure the metrics endpoint.
NOTIFICATIONS_DEBUG_PPROF bool false Enables pprof, which can be used for profiling.
NOTIFICATIONS_DEBUG_ZPAGES bool false Enables zpages, which can be used for collecting and viewing in-memory traces.
OCIS_URL
NOTIFICATIONS_WEB_UI_URL		 string https://localhost:9200 The public facing URL of the oCIS Web UI, used e.g. when sending notification eMails
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_HOST string SMTP host to connect to.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_PORT int 0 Port of the SMTP host to connect to.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_SENDER string Sender address of emails that will be sent (e.g. ‘ownCloud noreply@example.com’.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_USERNAME string Username for the SMTP host to connect to.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_PASSWORD string Password for the SMTP host to connect to.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_INSECURE bool false Allow insecure connections to the SMTP server.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_AUTHENTICATION string Authentication method for the SMTP communication. Possible values are ’login’, ‘plain’, ‘crammd5’, ’none’ or ‘auto’. If set to ‘auto’ or unset, the authentication method is automatically negotiated with the server.
NOTIFICATIONS_SMTP_ENCRYPTION string none Encryption method for the SMTP communication. Possible values are ‘starttls’, ‘ssltls’ and ’none’.
OCIS_EVENTS_ENDPOINT
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_ENDPOINT		 string 127.0.0.1:9233 The address of the event system. The event system is the message queuing service. It is used as message broker for the microservice architecture.
OCIS_EVENTS_CLUSTER
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_CLUSTER		 string ocis-cluster The clusterID of the event system. The event system is the message queuing service. It is used as message broker for the microservice architecture. Mandatory when using NATS as event system.
OCIS_INSECURE
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_TLS_INSECURE		 bool false Whether to verify the server TLS certificates.
OCIS_EVENTS_TLS_ROOT_CA_CERTIFICATE
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_TLS_ROOT_CA_CERTIFICATE		 string The root CA certificate used to validate the server’s TLS certificate. If provided NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_TLS_INSECURE will be seen as false.
OCIS_EVENTS_ENABLE_TLS
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_ENABLE_TLS		 bool false Enable TLS for the connection to the events broker. The events broker is the ocis service which receives and delivers events between the services.
OCIS_EVENTS_AUTH_USERNAME
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_AUTH_USERNAME		 string The username to authenticate with the events broker. The events broker is the ocis service which receives and delivers events between the services.
OCIS_EVENTS_AUTH_PASSWORD
NOTIFICATIONS_EVENTS_AUTH_PASSWORD		 string The password to authenticate with the events broker. The events broker is the ocis service which receives and delivers events between the services.
OCIS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH
NOTIFICATIONS_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_PATH		 string Path to Email notification templates overriding embedded ones.
OCIS_TRANSLATION_PATH
NOTIFICATIONS_TRANSLATION_PATH		 string (optional) Set this to a path with custom translations to overwrite the builtin translations. Note that file and folder naming rules apply, see the documentation for more details.
OCIS_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE string The default language used by services and the WebUI. If not defined, English will be used as default. See the documentation for more details.
OCIS_REVA_GATEWAY string com.owncloud.api.gateway CS3 gateway used to look up user metadata
OCIS_GRPC_CLIENT_TLS_MODE string TLS mode for grpc connection to the go-micro based grpc services. Possible values are ‘off’, ‘insecure’ and ‘on’. ‘off’: disables transport security for the clients. ‘insecure’ allows using transport security, but disables certificate verification (to be used with the autogenerated self-signed certificates). ‘on’ enables transport security, including server certificate verification.
OCIS_GRPC_CLIENT_TLS_CACERT string Path/File name for the root CA certificate (in PEM format) used to validate TLS server certificates of the go-micro based grpc services.
OCIS_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_ID
NOTIFICATIONS_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_ID		 string The ID of the service account the service should use. See the ‘auth-service’ service description for more details.
OCIS_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_SECRET
NOTIFICATIONS_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_SECRET		 string The service account secret.
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