charity-base / charity-base-router

Serving multiple CharityBase services from a single domain

CharityBase Router

There are multiple CharityBase services: a GraphQL API, a legacy REST API, an auth API, a web app and a docs site. It's tempting to combine all these codebases into a monorepo, however we opt to keep them separate and deploy each to a unique domain. This router makes use of Now's routing to unify all services under the single domain charitybase.uk. Note that this is not the only entry point - the service-specific domains are still publicly accessible.

 +-------+             +--------
 |Web App+---+     +---+Docs v4|-[Deprecated]
 +-------+   |     |   +-------+
             |     |
      +------+-----+-----+
      |CharityBase Router|
      +-----+---+---+----+
            |   |   |
+--------+  |   |   |  +-----------+
|Auth API+--+   |   +--+REST API v4|-[Deprecated]
+--------+      |      +-----------+
          +-----+-----+
          |GraphQL API|
          +-----------+

Requirements

Now - can be installed globally with npm: npm i -g now

You either need to use Now's nameservers or create a CNAME / ALIAS DNS record with value alias.zeit.co.

Creating the Router

From this directory, run:

now && now alias

This only needs to be done once, or anytime the routes to services change.

Redirect

We could add www.charitybase.uk as an alias in the config, however we opt to serve from the naked domain charitybase.uk only. We therefore need to redirect www requests to the naked domain. This can be tricky to achieve with DNS records so we use a separate Now alias to do the redirect.

From the redirect directory, run:

now && now alias

This only needs to be done once.