CoatRack

CoatRack is a framework to manage backend-to-backend communication via REST services, consisting of:

• distributed, lightweight API gateways and
• a centralized web application to generate and manage those API gateways.

CoatRack can facilitate your work if you have existing REST APIs and you want to do one (or more) of the following:

• monitoring the access to your APIs,
• authentication/authorization of calls to your APIs via API keys,
• monetization of API calls, based on pay-per-call rules or flatrates.

This project is part of FIWARE. For more information check the FIWARE Catalogue entry for API Management.

📚 Documentation	🐳 Docker Hub	🎯 Roadmap

Contents

• Background
• Usage
• [Build and Run CoatRack Locally via CLI](#Build and Run CoatRack Locally via CLI)
• [Build and Run CoatRack Locally via Docker Compose](#Build and Run CoatRack Locally via Docker Compose)
• License

Background

In case you would like to manage backend-to-backend communication via REST APIs, e.g. offering backend services to other parties, some general work is required in addition to developing the actual service API, e.g.:

• implementing mechanisms for authentication/authorisation,
• providing access credentials to the users,
• monitoring calls to the API,
• generating statistics.

CoatRack facilitates these general tasks, so that you can focus on developing the actual service API.

CoatRack comprises a central web application and distributed lighweight API gateways, which are:

• generated/configured via the central application and
• delivering statistics about monitored service API calls to the central application.

The following figure shows the typical CoatRack architecture, the CoatRack web application is depicted on the right and one CoatRack Service gateway is depicted on the left. The calls from the client to the service API are routed and logged by a custom CoatRack Gateway, which can be installed in the service provider's local network. Configuration and statistics are accessible via the CoatRack web application.

Usage

To start using CoatRack:

• either run CoatRack locally as explained in the "Install ..." sections
• or open the public instance available at https://coatrack.eu.

To log-in to CoatRack, a Github account is required. After logging in and filling in the registration form, the CoatRack Web Application will open. Use the "Getting started tutorials" that are accessible from inside the application to learn the basics of using CoatRack.

There are two tutorials inside the application:

• Offering service APIs via CoatRack
• Using service APIs offered via CoatRack

Build and Run CoatRack Locally via CLI

The following prerequisites are required:

• a Linux shell - Windows users can use the Windows-Powershell or the Git Bash shell instead, WSL is not supported
• OpenJDK 11
• Maven 3.6.3 or higher

Open a terminal, go into the coatrack directory and build all components using one the the commands below:

mvn clean package -DskipTests

Run the Web Application component (admin):

java -jar spring-boot/admin/target/coatrack-admin-*.jar

The windows terminal does not recognize the * . If you are using the windows terminal then the * is to be replaced by the proper coatrack version number. Just take a look at the jar file in spring-boot/admin/target/ directory and adapt the command above.

Now, open another session/terminal and additionally run the config-server component:

java -jar spring-boot/config-server/target/coatrack-config-server-*.jar

Now you a have a fully working instance of CoatRack using non-persistent databases. You can access it on http://localhost:8080.

Build and Run CoatRack Locally via Docker Compose

The following prerequisites are required:

• a Linux shell - Windows users can use WSL or the Git Bash shell instead
• OpenJDK 11
• Maven 3.6.3 or higher
• docker 20.10.12 or higher
• docker-compose 1.29.2 or higher

With your terminal go into the coatrack/docker directory where you will find the script build-and-deploy-images-locally.sh which builds CoatRack from source, creates container images on your local machine and runs CoatRack locally using these images. This is especially useful for developers who did changes to the source code and want to locally test the impact of these changes in a realistic setup.

License

CoatRack is licenced under Apache 2.0 License.

© 2013 - 2021 Corizon | Institut für angewandte Systemtechnik Bremen GmbH (ATB)