Configuration

Email notifications

Giskard can send email notifications about different events like inspector feedbacks or user invitation to the platform.

To configure this feature SMTP server credentials should be provided at startup through environment variables

Environment variable name	Purpose
GISKARD_MAIL_HOST	SMTP server address
GISKARD_MAIL_PORT	SMTP port, 587 by default
GISKARD_MAIL_USERNAME
GISKARD_MAIL_PASSWORD
GISKARD_MAIL_BASEURL	Publicly available Giskard instance URL

Backend JWT secret. Persistent user sessions.

Giskard authentication is based on JWT tokens. These tokens are issued by Giskard backend based on a JWT secret key.

To reinforce security there’s no default value of the secret key, whenever the backend starts it generates one automatically. However it means that users’ sessions are invalidated and they have to re-login.

For production instances, it’s preferred to keep user sessions alive no matter whether the server was rebooted or not. In this case, the JWT secret can be set from the outside by specifying GISKARD_JWT_SECRET environment variable. Its value should contain a base64 encoded bytes sequence of at least 128 bytes.

The following script can generate and store a secret key of 256 bytes:

# for zsh
echo export GISKARD_JWT_SECRET=`openssl rand -base64 256 | tr -d '\n'` >> ~/.zshrc

# for bash
echo export GISKARD_JWT_SECRET=`openssl rand -base64 256 | tr -d '\n'` >> ~/.bashrc

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any issues, join our Discord on our #support channel. Our community will help!