netlify-ns1-service

A service that wraps some features of http://ns1.com 's API.

Created as an interview project for Netlify.

Auto-generated Swagger Docs

https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/ae-sandbox/netlify-ns1-service/0.0.1

Usage

# build the project
make build

# start the service
NS1_APIKEY=yourapikey ./bin/netlify-ns1-service

Example (using HTTPie):

$ http :5000/zones/asdfae.com/www.asdfae.com/A

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 217
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 23:33:42 GMT

{
    "answers": [
        {
            "answer": [
                "1.2.3.5"
            ],
            "id": "5d97d53ff2abd000010222cf"
        }
    ],
    "domain": "www.asdfae.com",
    "filters": [],
    "id": "5d96eceac94a9000019d308c",
    "meta": {},
    "ttl": 3600,
    "type": "A",
    "use_client_subnet": true,
    "zone": "asdfae.com"
}

Development Plan

• Generate a OpenAPI/Swagger definition for the API
• Use https://github.com/deepmap/oapi-codegen to generate boilerplate
• Use https://github.com/ns1/ns1-go to implement routes
  • tests? use a mock?
• Also save zones/records in a sql database
  • https://github.com/Masterminds/squirrel
  • https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3
• Create a UI for the api - likely CLI
  • Use OAPI definition to generate a client

Development Notes

• This was my first project in Go bigger than toy examples (but not the first REST API I've created). A lot of time was spent getting familiar with the language, how projects are generally set up, and the broader ecosystem of packages.
• I decided to start with an OpenAPI/Swagger specification because it would allow me to generate a lot of the boilerplate (>2000 LOC!) and provide the first layer of documentation
• I decided to copy NS1's API, since the service is mostly a proxy for it. The first pass was to define it using OpenAPI
• I generated schemas for the requests/responses from the structs in the NS1 go client. This saves some time.
• The code generator uses the Echo http framework. Its similar to Node frameworks I've used in the past, so it felt a bit familiar.
• Implementing handlers was pretty straightforward, converting request bodies into structs, and then passing them to the NS1 api client
• I ran out of time after getting the basics working. Unfortunately, it's a glorified proxy, but it's a good starting point for the next steps.

Things cut for time

• Testing
  • I was planing on creating a handlers_test.go file where I would mock the context (and NS1 API client, and eventually the database connection) and test all the handler methods
• The database integration
  • I was planning on creating a simple SQLite database, that updated on write operations after the NS1 requests completed. Each request would get a DB connection where the handler could make queries using a query builder
• Docs
  • Docs are automatically generated from the OpenAPI spec with swagger hub
  • This is a basic level, was hoping to flesh them out with more examples and a guide on how/why you'd use this API
• CLI UI
  • nowhere near enough time