🖥  api.alexmontague.ca  📬

My personal server that I use for www.alexmontague.ca

• Currently this server is hosted on a raspberry pi, running 24/7 as my personal API and email server!
• I wanted a server that I could completely customize to my current needs, and have the scalability to fulfil my future needs!
• The API can be accessed at api.alexmontague.ca try pinging /resume for a JSON representation of my resume!
• Using this server as an opportunity to learn GoLang and networking stuff!

How to Run

If you want to spin up a similar Golang API, heres how you run mine

1. Clone the repo
2. Make sure Go is installed
3. I suggest also having a session manager installed like tmux to persist sessions after sshing into the server (as I leave the pi running 24/7)
4. SSH into your server if applicable
5. Start a new session tmux new -s API
6. Run the server using go run main.go
7. The server will log endpoint info to stdout

The following steps are configuring the server as it runs on my personal network

Create a Reverse Proxy

I use nginx as a reverse proxy so I can direct requests from my default ip to the server running on my specific port

1. Install nginx
2. Start nginx and restart on reboots sudo systemctl start nginx && sudo systemctl enable nginx
3. Create an nginx config file in /etc/nginx/conf.d named whatever you want. I have this config named goApi.conf
4. In the config file paste this:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  server_name <EXTERNAL_DOMAIN>;

  location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:<PORT>/;
  }
}

Replace <EXTERNAL_DOMAIN> with your server's domain or ip
Replace <PORT> with the local port your server is running on. In my case it is 8080

5. Test the config file to make sure there are no errors: sudo nginx -t
6. If everything looks good, restart nginx sudo nginx -s reload

Running the Cronjob

I also use a shell script to update my api domain record, as it is hosted through my dynamic home external ip. Here is how you set that up!

• Note: This implementation is for GoDaddy Domains. If your domain provider has an API, you would need to make a few changes

1. Create a GoDaddy API Key
2. Store the credentials in /etc/environment as GODADDY_KEY and GODADDY_SECRET respectfully so the cron can access these environment vars
3. Set up the cron using crontab -e and adding the cron */10 * * * * ~/go/src/api.alexmontague.ca/updateIP.sh >> ~/Documents/cronAPI.log 2>&1
   3.b) You do not need to redirect output if you do not want to log anything
4. If you did set up logging and wish to stream it in another tmux window, use tail -f ~/Documents/cronAPI.log