gmarmstrong / weatherapi-gateway

Use an nginx reverse proxy as an API gateway to WeatherAPI.com (developed within a 2-hour time limit)

weatherapi-gateway

Use an nginx reverse proxy as an API gateway to WeatherAPI.com

Usage

First, get a WeatherAPI.com account and generate an API key. The following commands assume that you have stored the API key in the environment variable WEATHER_API_KEY and that Docker is installed and the engine is running.

Please note: if you use the zsh shell (default on recent macOS installations), the URL must be enclosed in double quotes.

docker build -t weather_proxy:latest .
docker run -e WEATHER_API_KEY=$WEATHER_API_KEY -p 80:80 weather_proxy:latest
curl "localhost:80/v1/current.json?q=10014&aqi=no"

Thoughts

• We'll be using Weather API

• We can use nginx for a reverse proxy

• Today is Monday, August 22, 2022 and the time is 3:50 pm EDT. We have 2 hours to complete this project.

• Let's begin by creating an nginx server in Docker.

• Next, we'll set up a simple reverse proxy in nginx

• Actually, before we do that, let's put the nginx.conf file where it belongs

  • nginx.conf is in the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory, but some tutorials suggest the templates directory instead (makes sense)

• Now we'll actually configure the reverse proxy

• Reverse proxy configured, but changes aren't appearing... still redirected to default nginx home page

  • Copying nginx.conf to /etc/nginx.conf doesn't help either
  • There are four different nginx configuration files in /etc:
    • /etc/nginx.conf
    • /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    • /etc/nginx/conf.d/nginx.conf
    • /etc/nginx/templates/nginx.conf
  • nginx/templates/nginx.conf is the same as nginx.conf
  • nginx.conf looks compatible with our configuration
  • nginx/conf.d/default.conf problematic? likely!

• default.conf seems safe to delete entirely, and doing so moves us forward!

• Time is now 4:24 pm EDT (5:50 pm is deadline)

  • localhost:80 gives 200 OK with message All OK
  • localhost:80/v1/current.json gives {"error":{"code":1002,"message":"API key is invalid or not provided."}}
    • Makes sense, since we haven't provided an API key yet

• We can begin by passing the API key as an environment variable through Docker's ENV instruction

  • Weather API docs
  • Weather API's authentication docs recommend using key=<YOUR API KEY> as a query parameter, but passing secrets in the URL isn't a good idea. It would also be hard to append that query parameter to the proxy_pass URL (consider ? vs & in URLs), and regex doesn't feel like a proper solution here.
  • Can we provide the query parameter in the headers or body of the request instead?
    • At least in this case, yes we can! Just name the header "key" and set the value to the API key.

• Time is now 4:44 pm EDT

  • localhost:80 gives 200 OK with message All OK
  • localhost:80/v1/current.json gives {"error":{"code":1003,"message":"Parameter q is missing."}}
  • localhost:80/v1/current.json?q=10014&aqi=no gives {"location":{"name":"New York",[...]}}
    • Great!

• Configured a GitHub Actions workflow to build and publish the Docker image to GitHub's container registry (ghcr). See "packages" in sidebar.

• Remaining TODOs have been moved to Issues

• Added usage instructions to README.md

• Time is now 5:39 pm EDT, deadline is 5:50 pm EDT. 11 minutes remaining.

• Created a Snyk workflow for code/security scanning