Setting up an Eik server

The Eik server is a Node.js application distributed on npm as @eik/service. It aims to be runnable as a service out of the box, but still be flexible and customizable enough to suite a wide range of infrastructures needs.

The only requirement to run the Eik server is a current long-term support (LTS) version of Node.js.

Testing an Eik server from the command line

The fastest way to test a running instance of the Eik server is by using npx.

npx @eik/service

This will install the latest Eik server and start it at http://localhost:4001.

warning

By default all uploads are stored in a temporary directory that will be lost when your operating system cleans it up. To configure a persistent storage, set the SINK_PATH environment variable to a suitable location on disk.

Production setup

@eik/service also includes a Fastify plugin, so you can configure and extend the Eik service to fit your needs.

In this example we set up an Eik server using the local file system for storage. Use or implement a different sink if you need other another storage solution.

Create a new project and install the required dependencies

mkdir eik-server
cd eik-server
npm init -y
npm install fastify @eik/service @eik/sink-file-system

Create index.js and add the following.

import path from "node:path";
import fastify from "fastify";
import Service from "@eik/service";
import Sink from "@eik/sink-file-system";

const sink = new Sink({
	sinkFsRootPath: path.join(process.cwd(), ".eik", "storage"),
});

const service = new Service({ sink });

const app = fastify({
	ignoreTrailingSlash: true,
	modifyCoreObjects: false,
	trustProxy: true,
});

app.register(service.api());

const run = async () => {
	await service.health();
	await app.listen({
		port: service.config.get("http.port"),
		host: service.config.get("http.address"),
	});
};

run();

Configuring for production

@eik/service reads YAML configuration from config/ based on NODE_ENV.

Add config/production.yaml to change secrets and other commonly used settings.

mkdir config
touch config/development.yaml
touch config/production.yaml

See the @eik/service config to see what values you can configure. Here's a typical config/production.yaml.

organization:
  # replace with your organisation name
  name: store
  hostnames:
    - localhost
    # replace with your Eik server's domain
    - eik.store.com
jwt:
  # replace with the absolute path to a file holding your
  # jwt secret as plaintext (uses convict-format-secrets)
  secret: /var/run/secrets/auth_jwt_secret

basicAuth:
  # replace with the absolute path to a file holding your
  # basic auth key as plaintext (uses convict-format-secrets)
  key: /var/run/secrets/basic_auth_key

http:
  port: 8080
  address: "0.0.0.0"

log:
  level: info

Run your Eik server

To run your Eik server with Node in production:

NODE_ENV=production node index.js

To run your Eik server with Node in development:

NODE_ENV=development node index.js