Fake OFION rest services

We will be creating a RESTful API using Flask that is used to store users details, which will have CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functions, allowing us to create new items, get details of existing items, update details of existing items and delete it.

Also it process an invoice file from an example URL.

1.Installation & Deployment

./up.sh && python apy.py

2.Testing tool

For testing a good way is to install Postman tool.

3.Options to create an invoice:

3.1. Create an invoice executing sh post.sh located in test folder 3.2. Create a defualt user by a PDF http requested. The defualt user_id value is zero. For that, execute the following request: http://localhost:8081/invoice/user/0

4.GET methods:

From step 2: Get an invoice for default user: ID is zero

Request: http://localhost:8081/invoice/user/0

Response:

content-length:99
server: Werkzeug/0.14.1 Python/2.7.12
date:Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:33:53 GMT
{
  "invoice": {
    "Address": "254 East Road", 
    "Date": "26/02/2001", 
    "InvoiceID": 859652, 
    "Name": "Mr. Christopher Jones", 
    "State": "Globeland             1001", 
    "Url_invoice": "http://visibillity.com/collateral/electronic_documents/invoice.pdf", 
    "Zone": "Globecity East", 
    "id_user": 0
  }
}

Get all invoices:

Request: http://localhost:8081/invoices

Response:

{
  "invoice": [
    {
      "Address": "23 East Road France", 
      "Date": "Wed, 29 Aug 2018 07:52:42 GMT", 
      "InvoiceID": "123456789", 
      "Name": "Mr.Romeo Trump", 
      "State": "EEUU", 
      "Url_invoice": "http://external_services_ofion_invoice.pdf", 
      "Zone": "New York", 
      "id_user": 3
    }, 
    {
      "Address": "23 East Road France", 
      "Date": "Wed, 29 Aug 2018 07:52:43 GMT", 
      "InvoiceID": "123456789", 
      "Name": "Mr.Romeo Trump", 
      "State": "EEUU", 
      "Url_invoice": "http://external_services_ofion_invoice.pdf", 
      "Zone": "New York", 
      "id_user": 28
    }
  ]
}

5. Install and enable mod_wsgi

Install: sh /install/basic.sh

5.1 Apache setup - WSGI

In this chapter we want to serve the page using Apache via WSGI which helps to get our code deployed on Apache. Here is the Apache config file (/etc/apache2/sites-available/ofion.conf):

<VirtualHost *:80>

	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	ServerName localhost

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

	WSGIDaemonProcess services user=www-data group=www-data threads=5
	WSGIProcessGroup services
	
	WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/FLASKAPPS/services/ofion.wsgi
	#Alias /static/ /var/www/FLASKAPPS/services/static

	<Directory /var/www/FLASKAPPS/services/static>
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

$ sudo a2ensite ofion.conf

The WSGI file (/var/www/FlASKAPPS/ofion.wsgi)

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
sys.path.insert(0,"/var/www/FLASKAPPS/")
from services import app as application

6. Serving static content from outside of the WAR (Apache Tomcat)

This method can be used to serve images, JS, CSS, JSON, PDFs and even static HTML web pages. Tomcat will serve any static content from a WAR file using the DefaultServlet. Tommcat can be configured to read files from anywhere on disk and serve them on an specific URL. This configuration is completly separete from you app config. The configuration is in Tomcat's server.xml config file.

Context docBase="/var/www/FLASKAPPS/static/invoices" path="/static"/

A Context element is added inside Host element. It has got two attributes: docBase is the directory on disk that contains your static files and path is the URL that you want to serve the files on.

Author - fernando.mendez@atos.net