Docker MCRIT

Dockerized Setup for the MinHash-based Code Recognition and Investigation Toolkit (MCRIT).

Summary

This repository intends to enable you to quickly run a production-ready deployment of MCRIT including its frontend MCRITweb with minimal effort through a pre-configured Docker setup.
The latest commit on this repository will always hold references to the most recent versions of the front- and backend, and stable milestone releases will be marked as such.

Setup

Given an installation of docker-compose, running this command in the repository root:

$ docker-compose up

should build the MCRIT server and worker as well as the MCRITweb images, pull images for mongodb and nginx, and then start up containers for everything.

The data produced and stored by the services are found in ./storage:

• ./storage/mcritweb contains the sqlite DB for the web application and cached data, such as matching reports in JSON format
• ./storage/mongodb contains all collections and indices, allowing it to persist across MCRIT web instance rebuilds and updates.

Setup for HTTP(S)

By default, the NGINX included in this setup is only listening for the server_name of localhost, so you will need to configure

• ./nginx/mcritweb_plain.conf or recommendably:
• ./nginx/mcritweb_ssl.conf

based on the specifics of your server.

If you want to run the service over HTTPS

• you will need to adjust the NGINX service of the docker-compose.yml to use the ./nginx/mcritweb_ssl.conf instead of ./nginx/mcritweb_plain.conf and
• Fill the respective files in ./nginx/ssl with a certificate, private key, and ideally fresh Diffie-Hellman parameters.

Development Mode

If you want to use this Docker setup for development on MCRIT, you will need the code repositories available outside of the containers to trivially reflect your changes. For this, mcrit and mcritweb should first be cloned into ./repositories, for which you can conveniently use the script clone_repositories.sh. Afterwards, you can start the setup up in development mode, using:

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yml up

Note that running in development mode will not start up NGINX, meaning you can reach MCRIT only via ports 5000 (frontend) and 8000 (backend).

Usage

For an explanation of the usage of MCRIT itself, please refer to the respective repositories for

• backend: MCRIT (documentation in preparation)
• frontend: MCRITweb (documentation)

History

MCRIT was officially released as version 1.0.0 at Botconf 2023 (paper, slides, video)