Upgrade to v7

The purpose of this note is to help developers to upgrade their agent from v6 to v7. Please read carefully and integrate the following breaking changes to ensure a smooth upgrade.​

Please be sure of your agent type and version and pick the right documentation accordingly.

Node.js

This is the documentation of the forest-express-sequelize and forest-express-mongoose Node.js agents that will soon reach end-of-support.

forest-express-sequelize v9 and forest-express-mongoose v9 are replaced by @forestadmin/agent v1.

Please check your agent type and version and read on or switch to the right documentation.

Ruby on Rails

This is still the latest Ruby on Rails documentation of the forest_liana agent, you’re at the right place, please read on.

Python

This is the documentation of the django-forestadmin Django agent that will soon reach end-of-support.

If you’re using a Django agent, notice that django-forestadmin v1 is replaced by forestadmin-agent-django v1.

If you’re using a Flask agent, go to the forestadmin-agent-flask v1 documentation.

Please check your agent type and version and read on or switch to the right documentation.

PHP

This is the documentation of the forestadmin/laravel-forestadmin Laravel agent that will soon reach end-of-support.

If you’re using a Laravel agent, notice that forestadmin/laravel-forestadmin v1 is replaced by forestadmin/laravel-forestadmin v3.

If you’re using a Symfony agent, go to the forestadmin/symfony-forestadmin v1 documentation.

Please check your agent type and version and read on or switch to the right documentation.

Upgrade to v7

Please follow the recommended procedure to upgrade your agent version by following this note.

Upgrading to v7

This upgrade unlocks the following feature:

• easier addition of additional databases

• no need to re-authenticate when switching between projects/environments/team

• dynamic smart action forms

• automatic model update

Before upgrading to v7, please take note of the following requirement:

• express must be version 4.17 or higher

As for any dependency upgrade, it's very important to test this upgrade in your testing environments. Not doing so could result in your admin panel being unusable.

To upgrade to v7, simply run:

SQL

npm install forest-express-sequelize@^7.12.3

Mongodb

npm install forest-express-mongoose@^7.9.2

In case of a regression introduced in Production after the upgrade, a rollback to your previous agent is the fastest way to restore your admin panel.

Breaking changes

Agent initialization

In the file middlewares/forestadmin.js, the parameters of Liana.init have been updated. A few parameters have been deprecated and will either be ignored or throw an error.

Two new parameters have also been introduced to ease the addition and management of multiple databases.

The below tables list all these parameters:

Deprecated parameters	Behavior	Replace by
onlyCrudModule	Ignored
modelsDir	Ignored
sequelize	Ignored
mongoose	Ignored
secretKey	Error	envSecret
authKey	Error	authSecret

New parameters	Description
objectMapping	static instance of your object mapper (require('sequelize') or require('mongoose'))
connections	map of your existing connections, indexed by a unique name for each connections

Here is an example of an updated middlewares/forestadmin.js file after the migration:

middlewares/forestadmin.js

const { objectMapping, connections } = require('../models');

module.exports = async function forestadmin(app) {
  app.use(
    await Liana.init({
      configDir: path.join(__dirname, '../forest'),
      envSecret: process.env.FOREST_ENV_SECRET,
      authSecret: process.env.FOREST_AUTH_SECRET,
      objectMapping,
      connections,
    })
  );

  console.log(
    chalk.cyan(
      'Your admin panel is available here: https://app.forestadmin.com/projects'
    )
  );
};

Models index

The models/index.js file should be updated as well, in order to export objectMapping & connections

SQL

models/index.js

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const Sequelize = require('sequelize');

const databasesConfiguration = require('../config/databases');

const connections = {};
const db = {};

databasesConfiguration.forEach((databaseInfo) => {
  const connection = new Sequelize(
    databaseInfo.connection.url,
    databaseInfo.connection.options
  );
  connections[databaseInfo.name] = connection;

  const modelsDir =
    databaseInfo.modelsDir || path.join(__dirname, databaseInfo.name);
  fs.readdirSync(modelsDir)
    .filter((file) => file.indexOf('.') !== 0 && file !== 'index.js')
    .forEach((file) => {
      try {
        const model = connection.import(path.join(modelsDir, file))(
          connection,
          Sequelize.DataTypes
        );
        db[model.name] = model;
      } catch (error) {
        console.error('Model creation error: ' + error);
      }
    });
});

Object.keys(db).forEach((modelName) => {
  if ('associate' in db[modelName]) {
    db[modelName].associate(db);
  }
});

db.objectMapping = Sequelize;
db.connections = connections;

module.exports = db;

Mongodb

models/index.js

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const Mongoose = require('mongoose');

const databasesConfiguration = require('../config/databases');

const connections = {};
const db = {};

databasesConfiguration.forEach((databaseInfo) => {
  const connection = Mongoose.createConnection(
    databaseInfo.connection.url,
    databaseInfo.connection.options
  );
  connections[databaseInfo.name] = connection;

  const modelsDir =
    databaseInfo.modelsDir || path.join(__dirname, databaseInfo.name);
  fs.readdirSync(modelsDir)
    .filter((file) => file.indexOf('.') !== 0 && file !== 'index.js')
    .forEach((file) => {
      try {
        const model = require(path.join(modelsDir, file))(connection, Mongoose);
        db[model.modelName] = model;
      } catch (error) {
        console.error(`Model creation error: ${error}`);
      }
    });
});

db.objectMapping = Mongoose;
db.connections = connections;

module.exports = db;

Introducing database configuration

A config/databases.js file should be added as follows in order to declare the different database connections:

SQL

const path = require('path');

const databaseOptions = {
  logging:
    !process.env.NODE_ENV || process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development'
      ? console.log
      : false,
  pool: { maxConnections: 10, minConnections: 1 },
  dialectOptions: {},
};
if (
  process.env.DATABASE_SSL &&
  JSON.parse(process.env.DATABASE_SSL.toLowerCase())
) {
  const rejectUnauthorized = process.env.DATABASE_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED;
  if (
    rejectUnauthorized &&
    JSON.parse(rejectUnauthorized.toLowerCase()) === false
  ) {
    databaseOptions.dialectOptions.ssl = { rejectUnauthorized: false };
  } else {
    databaseOptions.dialectOptions.ssl = true;
  }
}
module.exports = [
  {
    name: 'default',
    modelsDir: path.resolve(__dirname, '../models'),
    connection: {
      url: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
      options: { ...databaseOptions },
    },
  },
];

Mongodb

const path = require('path');

const databaseOptions = {
  useNewUrlParser: true,
  useUnifiedTopology: true,
};
module.exports = [
  {
    name: 'default',
    modelsDir: path.resolve(__dirname, '../models'),
    connection: {
      url: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
      options: { ...databaseOptions },
    },
  },
];

Calling sequelize with one of the 2 following syntaxes will not work anymore:

const { sequelize } = require('../models'); ❌

const models = require('../models'); const sequelize = models.sequelize; ❌

Instead, you should now use

const sequelize = require('../models').connections.default;

Mongoose specific changes

If you made the above recommended changes in your models/index.js file, your Mongoose model files should now be written this way:

/models/companies.js

// Models are now returned from a function
module.exports = (mongoose, Mongoose) => {
  const schema = Mongoose.Schema({
     'country': String,
     ...
  });
  return mongoose.model('companies', schema, 'companies');
};

Authentication

One of the changes introduced by the v7 is that you no longer need to re-authenticate when switching between projects/environments/team. In order to support this easier authentication flow, the changes described below need to be made.

New environment variable

A new environment variable called APPLICATION_URL is required and must be added to your .env file.

http://localhost:3310 is the default value to be set for the APPLICATION_URL. If you specified a specific url for your application in place of the default one (for example for an install on a remote machine), this url should be the value set.

New CORS condition

A change in your app.js is required to modify how CORS are handled. The value 'null' must be accepted for authentication endpoints (lines 11-17).

let allowedOrigins = [/\.forestadmin\.com$/, /localhost:\d{4}$/];
if (process.env.CORS_ORIGINS) {
  allowedOrigins = allowedOrigins.concat(process.env.CORS_ORIGINS.split(','));
}
const corsConfig = {
  origin: allowedOrigins,
  allowedHeaders: ['Authorization', 'X-Requested-With', 'Content-Type'],
  maxAge: 86400, // NOTICE: 1 day
  credentials: true,
};
app.use(
  '/forest/authentication',
  cors({
    ...corsConfig,
    // The null origin is sent by browsers for redirected AJAX calls
    // we need to support this in authentication routes because OIDC
    // redirects to the callback route
    origin: corsConfig.origin.concat('null'),
  })
);
app.use(cors(corsConfig));

Running up multiple server instances

If you're running multiple instances of your agent (with a load balancer for example), you will need to set up a static client id.

Without a static client id, authentication will fail whenever a user makes a request to a different instance than the one he logged into.

First you will need to obtain a client id for your environment by running the following command:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer FOREST_ENV_SECRET" \
     -X POST \
     -d '{"token_endpoint_auth_method": "none", "redirect_uris": ["APPLICATION_URL/forest/authentication/callback"]}' \
     https://api.forestadmin.com/oidc/reg

Then assign the client_id value from the response (it's a JWT) to a FOREST_CLIENT_ID variable in your .env file.

Important Notice

Changelogs

This release note covers only the major changes. To learn more, please refer to the changelogs in our different repositories:

• Express-sequelize changelog
• Express-mongoose changelog