This project contains the code for the Minion Frontend. It provides a simple website to manage users and groups, manage sites to scan, and create and start scans.

Setting up a Development Environment

Note that Mozilla maintains Vagrant and Docker configurations for Minion. It’s the best and easiest way to get started with development!

The following instructions for manual installation assume a recent version of Ubuntu; we currently test with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr). Although Minion can be installed anywhere on your system, we recommend· /opt/minion/minion-frontend for the frontend, and /opt/minion/minion-env for your virtualenv.

First, install the essentials:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install -y build-essential git libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev \
    libssl-dev python python-dev python-virtualenv supervisor

Then, create and source your virtual environment. This will help keep Minion isolated from the rest of your system. We also need to upgrade setuptools from the version included with Ubuntu by default:

# mkdir -p /etc/minion /opt/minion
# cd /opt/minion
# virtualenv minion-env
# source minion-env/bin/activate

(minion-env)# easy_install --upgrade setuptools    # required for Mock

Next, setup your system with the following directories and the minion user account. We’ll also create some convenience shell commands, to make working with Minion easier when running as the minion user:

# useradd -m minion
# install -m 700 -o minion -g minion -d /run/minion -d /var/lib/minion -d /var/log/minion -d ~minion/.python-eggs

# echo -e "\n# Automatically source minion-frontend virtualenv" >> ~minion/.profile
# echo -e "source /opt/minion/minion-env/bin/activate" >> ~minion/.profile

# echo -e "\n# Minion convenience commands" >> ~minion/.bashrc
# echo -e "alias miniond=\"supervisord -c /opt/minion/minion-frontend/etc/supervisord.conf\"" >> ~minion/.bashrc
# echo -e "alias minionctl=\"supervisorctl -c /opt/minion/minion-frontend/etc/supervisord.conf\"" >> ~minion/.bashrc

Now we can checkout Minion and install it:

# cd /opt/minion
# git clone https://github.com/mozilla/minion-frontend.git
# source minion-env/bin/activate
(minion-env)# python setup.py develop

To make sure that Minion starts when the system reboots, we need to install the Minion init script. We can also disable the global supervisord installed with apt-get install above, if it wasn’t being used before:

# cp /opt/minion/minion-frontend/scripts/minion-init /etc/init.d/minion
# chown root:root /etc/init.d/minion
# chmod 755 /etc/init.d/minion
# update-rc.d minion defaults 40
# update-rc.d -f supervisor remove

And that’s it! Provided that everything installed successfully, we can start everything up:

# service minion start

From this point on, you should be able to control the Minion processes either as root or as the newly-created minion user. Let’s su - minion, and see if everything is running properly:

(minion-env)minion@minion-frontend:~$ service minion status
minion-frontend                  RUNNING    pid 1506, uptime 1 day, 1:25:41

Success! You can also use minionctl (an alias to supervisorctl, using the Minion supervisord.conf configuration) to stop and start individual services, or check on status:

(minion-env)minion@minion-frontend:~$ minionctl stop minion-frontend
minion-frontend: stopped
(minion-env)minion@minion-frontend:~$ minionctl status minion-frontend
minion-frontend                  STOPPED    Sep 09 07:15 PM
(minion-env)minion@minion-frontend:~$ minionctl start minion-frontend
minion-frontend: started
(minion-env)minion@minion-frontend:~$ minionctl status minion-frontend
minion-frontend                  RUNNING    pid 8713, uptime 0:00:05

Configuring your Minion environment

By default, Minion will use the configuration file frontend.json to determine the authentication method as well as the location of the Minion backend API. If you would like to change this file at all, copy it into /etc/minion, make your changes, and restart Minion.

Minion currently supports both Persona and LDAP authentication, with Persona being the default authentication method. To switch to LDAP authentication, change type in login from persona to ldap, and change the ldap configuration section to point to the correct LDAP server and base DN.