Customer Portal

Overview

The Customer Portal is a self-service, white-labelled frontend for end users. It allows customers to view their order history, manage payment methods, and update their profile.

Capabilities

Capability	Description
Order Management	View past orders and current statuses.
Profile Management	Update user details and preferences.
Responsive Design	Built with Vue 3 and Bootstrap 5 for mobile and desktop.

Architecture

The Customer Portal is a Single Page Application (SPA) served by Nginx. It communicates via REST to the Labs64.IO APIs through the Auth Gateway.

flowchart LR
    Browser["Client Browser"]
    
    subgraph K8s_Cluster ["K8s Cluster"]
        CP["Customer Portal Pod (Nginx)"]
        T["Traefik Ingress"]
        AG["Auth Gateway"]
        CO["Checkout API"]
    end
    
    Browser -->|"GET /"| T
    T -->|"Serve Static Assets"| CP
    
    Browser -->|"GET /api/v1/orders"| T
    T --> AG
    AG --> CO

Quick Start

The portal is accessible in the local Kubernetes deployment at:

• URL: http://portal.localhost

Configuration

Because the portal is a compiled Vue application, runtime configuration is injected via a config.json file served by Nginx at startup.

Variable	Description	Default
VITE_API_BASE_URL	The base URL for backend API calls.	/api
VITE_THEME_COLOR	The primary brand color (hex).	#0055ff

REST APIs

The Customer Portal is a client, not a server. It does not expose REST APIs.

Events

The Customer Portal does not publish events directly to RabbitMQ.

Examples

Injecting Configuration via ConfigMap

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: customer-portal-config
data:
  config.json: |
    {
      "apiBaseUrl": "https://api.labs64.io",
      "themeColor": "#ff0000"
    }

Operations

The Customer Portal is packaged as static assets within an Nginx Alpine container. It is highly cacheable. In production, consider placing a CDN (like CloudFront or Cloudflare) in front of the Ingress to serve the static assets.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Resolution
Blank page on load	API CORS issues	Ensure the API gateway is configured to allow origins from the portal domain.
Routing 404s on refresh	Nginx misconfiguration	The Nginx container is pre-configured for SPA routing (try_files $uri /index.html). If overwritten, ensure this rule is restored.