🧩 AI Helpdesk Chatbot IF

This repository contains the implementation for the AI Helpdesk Chatbot project.
It follows a microservices architecture where each core responsibility is separated into its own service.

The goal is to support features described in the SRS:

• Student/Staff/Sponsor authentication with OTP
• Multi-turn chatbot backed by Knowledge Base (KB)
• Asynchronous compute tasks for KB indexing & LLM jobs
• Email notifications from OTP
• Logging & monitoring
• Scalable infrastructure with RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Redis

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📦 Service Responsibilities

authentication-service:

• User login via email OTP
• Integrates with Keycloak to issue JWTs
• Stores OTPs temporarily in Redis

broker-service:

• Exposes API endpoints that publish tasks to RabbitMQ

listener-service:

• Consumes RabbitMQ jobs asynchronously
• Processes updates, background tasks, etc

logger-service:

• Collects logs from other services

mail-service:

• Sends OTP codes and notifications via SMTP
• Uses template system for consistent emails

front-end

• UI service Next.js
• Can be expanded to admin dashboard / student portal

project:

• Contains Docker Compose config
• Manages infra dependencies (Mongo, Redis, RabbitMQ)

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🧰 Core Technologies

• Node.js + Express → Service framework
• MongoDB → Knowledge Base & metadata store
• Redis → OTP storage, caching
• RabbitMQ → Message broker for async jobs
• Keycloak → Identity provider (RBAC, JWT)
• Docker Compose → Local orchestration
• Prometheus/Grafana → Monitoring & compute evaluation

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Getting Started

1. Clone Repo

git clone https://github.com/Raygama/rizzy-bytes.git

2. Start Services with Docker Compose

cd project
docker compose up --build

For dev and prod:

Go into the project folder then: For dev:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml up

→ Runs npm run dev with hot reload.

For prod:

docker compose up --build

→ Runs the optimized build (npm run build && npm run start).

Development Notes

• Each service is self-contained with its own package.json.
• Use .env inside each service for secrets & configs.
• Use docker-compose for local dev;
• Write unit tests inside each service (tests/ or test/ directories) (if needed)
• Observability: Prometheus scrapes /metrics on every service; Grafana is pre-provisioned (see “Observability” below).

CORS Configuration

• Every HTTP service (authentication-service, broker-service, mail-service, flowise-proxy) reads CORS_ORIGINS, a comma-separated list of allowed origins.
• Defaults allow http://localhost:3000 and http://127.0.0.1:3000, so the front end can call the APIs out of the box.
• Override per environment (e.g., CORS_ORIGINS=https://portal.example.com,https://admin.example.com) and include * only when you intentionally want to accept every origin.

Observability (Prometheus / Grafana)

• Prometheus: http://localhost:9090 (in compose network: http://prometheus:9090).
• Grafana: http://localhost:3009 (admin/admin by default). Datasource and dashboard are auto-provisioned from project/monitoring/grafana/.
• Metrics endpoints are exposed on every service at /metrics (listener worker is on port 9464).
• PromQL HTTP API (for backend/front-end visualizations via proxy):
  • Instant: GET /api/v1/query?query=<PROMQL>
  • Range: GET /api/v1/query_range?query=<PROMQL>&start=<ts>&end=<ts>&step=<s>
  • Example: http://localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=rate(flowise_proxy_http_request_duration_seconds_count[5m])
• Front-end note: Prometheus does not enable CORS. Fetch via your backend/proxy (or Grafana) instead of direct browser calls.

Rebuilding Docker Containers

In most cases, you do not need to rebuild the Docker images every time you change your code.
Thanks to volumes and hot reload, code changes update live.
However, there are specific situations where a rebuild is required.

When you add new dependencies

If you install a new npm package inside a service:

cd authentication-service
npm install some-package

Then you must rebuild that container so the new dependency is included:

docker compose build authentication-service
docker compose up

When you change Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml

If you modify:

• The Dockerfile (e.g., base image, build steps, commands)
• The docker-compose.yml (e.g., new service, environment variables)

Then you need to rebuild all services:

docker compose build
docker compose up

When you do NOT need to rebuild

• Editing code files (JavaScript/TypeScript, routes, controllers, etc.)
• Updating configs inside .env (unless baked into Dockerfile)
• Using Next.js hot reload or nodemon in development mode

🛑 Shutting Down the Application

When you are done testing or developing, you can stop the running containers in several ways.
This prevents services like MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, and the microservices from running in the background.

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Stop All Containers

If you started services with:

docker compose up

then simply press: CTRL + C (in the terminal) → this will stop all running services.

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml down

If you want to stop and remove containers explicitly:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml down

Summary

• Dev Start → docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml up
• Dev Stop → docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml down or CTRL+C
• Prod Start → docker compose up --build
• Prod Stop → docker compose down or CTRL+C