noahsh.dev

This devlog will serve as a sort of introduction to the project, attempts at certain features, rationale, etc.

To start, I had a project before this called CalBuddy - this is a small node.js app that would allow someone to take their Schoolbox calendar and automatically add it to their Google calendar.

Due to the nature of Schoolbox, being a closed-source LMS with limited documentation (although more than I expected!), and our SSO provider (Cloudwork Engine) requiring certificates to use SSO/authentication anywhere, I basically had to recreate the way the authentication flow worked, with PHPSESSID generation, consumation, SAMLRequests, basically web requests that would turn a username and password into a PHPSESSID/JWT bearer that could be used to pull a calendar token, so on and so forth.

However, as GearTrack aims to be a production-ready website for many people to use, this authorization flow would not work. And as I require certificate exchanges to use CloudworkEngine’s IdP (Identity Provider), and this being the base of the whole project, I have needed to make my own. Hence, GearTrack for the meantime is split into 2 parts, the IdP and the SP (Service Provider). It just allows me to test in development rather than requiring the use of production infrastructure, putting strain on it, and slowing down development.

And, both are almost (primitively) finished. The IdP has hardcoded credentials (which is good for no one in particular) hence a DB will be implemented next devlog. Both feature limited web interfaces, but are a good start.