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Chayan Das edited this page Oct 31, 2025 · 3 revisions

GSoC @ FOSSology

🌟 My GSoC 2025 Journey with FOSSology 🌟

This repository documents my entire journey as a Google Summer of Code 2025 contributor with FOSSology. From proposal to contributions, weekly updates, and the final report — everything is organized here.

📌 About the Project

This year, I'm working with FOSSology under GSoC 2025 on LicenseDB Platform Improvements.
The project focuses on enhancing LicenseDB with robust features like database migrations, rich text handling, Swagger 3.0 integration, structured logging, better search, and standardized API responses.

🛠️ Deliverables

  • Database Migrations
  • Mail Notifications
    • Notify admins, license creators, and project owners when a license gets updated.
  • Refresh Token Functionality
    • Implement refresh token support for secure and seamless authentication.
  • New Monorepo Setup
    • Restructure the project into a unified backend + frontend monorepo.
  • Minor Endpoint Improvements
    • Add changelogs for user endpoints.
    • Provide top X licenses/obligations with similar text.
    • Improve logging and REST API responses.
  • Test Coverage & Documentation
    • Improve unit, functional, and API test coverage.

✅ Database Migrations

PR: fossology/LicenseDB – #134

Background

In the context of the LicenseDB project, database migrations are essential to evolve the database schema reliably as new features get introduced. Before this work, LicenseDB lacked a standard migration system, making schema changes risky and non-versioned.

Objective

  • Introduce database migration support using golang-migrate/migrate.
  • Enable version-controlled, reversible, and safe schema upgrades.
  • Ensure compatibility with existing and future database changes.

Technical Approach

  • Added a dedicated migrations/ folder with versioned migration files (e.g., 0001_init.up.sql, 0001_init.down.sql).
  • Integrated a migration runner to apply migrations on startup or via CLI.
  • Added rollback support using .down.sql scripts.
  • Enhanced error handling + logging for migration failures.
  • Documented usage in README with guidelines for creating and running migrations.

Outcome

  • Successfully integrated a robust schema migration system into LicenseDB.
  • Developers can now safely introduce and track schema changes with version history.
  • Reduced deployment risks and established a scalable foundation for future features.

🧪 Test Environment Setup & E2E Test Coverage

PR: https://github.com/fossology/LicenseDb/pull/137

PR: https://github.com/fossology/LicenseDb/pull/161

To ensure reliable and reproducible testing for the LicenseDB backend, I introduced a standardized test environment for both local development and GitHub Actions CI, along with end-to-end (E2E) test coverage.

Local & CI Test Environment

Previously, setting up tests required manual DB configuration, which caused inconsistent results.
The new setup automates the entire testing workflow.

Key Improvements:

  • Automatic creation of a test PostgreSQL database
  • Database migrations applied before test execution
  • Test data (admin, users, license creators) seeded automatically
  • Automatic cleanup after tests to ensure isolation

Run full backend test suite locally:

go test ./...

This ensures developers can run tests on any machine with one command, without any extra setup.

E2E Test Coverage (~60–70%)

To validate real application behaviour rather than isolated unit scenarios, I added end-to-end tests covering major backend flows.

Coverage Includes:

  • Authentication and token workflow
  • License creation, update, and retrieval
  • Migration compatibility testing
  • API behaviour with real PostgreSQL interactions

This increased backend test coverage to ~60–70%, providing greater stability and confidence in future development.

🔧 Minor Endpoint Improvements

As part of enhancing the API usability and maintainability, several improvements were made to user-related endpoints, logging, and data-fetching workflows.

PR: https://github.com/fossology/LicenseDb/pull/140

PR: https://github.com/fossology/LicenseDb/pull/144

Changelogs for User Endpoints

Added support for endpoint-level changelogs, allowing users and admins to track what changed, when, and by whom.
This increases transparency across updates made to user profiles or roles.

Key Benefit: Easier auditability and traceability of user actions.

Fetch Licenses & Obligations by Text

Implemented a new feature to fetch existing licenses and obligations based on text input.
This allows developers and admins to quickly find similar licenses or obligations using text queries, improving the license comparison and reuse workflow.

Use Case Examples:

  • Search for an existing license before adding a new one
  • Compare obligations with similar text

Improved Logging with Zap

Replaced standard logging with Zap Logger for structured, performant, and context-rich logs.

Enhancements Achieved:

  • Consistent log formatting across services
  • JSON-structured logs for better observability
  • Easier debugging and log filtering in production

(Added Zap with the Refresh Token and Messaging System)

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