selectj / firstcatering-webservice

Synoptic project for L4 Just IT apprenticeship

First Catering RESTful API

L4 Software Developer Synoptic Project by Joseph Metcalfe

Project Requirements

Your task is to create a RESTful web service for First Catering Ltd that will allow Bows Formula One employees to use their existing data cards in the kiosks to register and top up with money.

• If the card is not registered on the system, the card owner will be required to provide basic employee information:
  • unique employee ID;
  • name;
  • email,
  • mobile number.
• A four-digit pin number chosen by the employee should be used for further security.
• The data used for providing the services must be held in a database.
• When a card is presented to the system and the service finds that the card is already registered, the system will show a welcome message with the user’s name associated with the card.
• If the user’s card is not registered, then the system will respond requesting that the card needs to be registered.
• It is envisaged that when the user taps their card a second time the system informs the user and says “Goodbye”.
• The application should timeout after a number of minutes of inactivity.
• You only need to provide the REST API, which should conform to industry standards.

How to Install & Run the Application

To install & run my application you will need Go installed. Please see the following on how to install Go for your system: https://golang.org/doc/ Please note these instructions are for Linux and may differ ever so slightly to a Windows installation. After installation as mentioned in the Go documentation, please ensure the environment varaible $GOPATH is set.

You will then need to get the following Go packages, by running the following:
go get github.com/gorilla/mux
go get github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql

Place all the .go files inside a directory, navigate to that directory and run go build to compile the application into an executable program named api.

Example

mkdir /var/firstcatering-webservice
go build /var/firstcatering-webservice

(Optional) Now to create the systemd service to allow the application to run as a daemon:

nano /lib/systemd/system/fcws.service

I used the following for my systemd service:

[Unit]
Description=First Catering RESTful API

[Service]
ExecStart=/var/firstcatering-webservice/api
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s
Type=simple

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then reload systemd and enable & start the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable fcws.service
systemctl start fcws.service

Should you wish to run the application without creating it as a systemd service, you could just run it from the command line in a screen session or something similar:

screen
/var/firstcatering-webservice/api
Ctrl+A then D #Detach from screen session
screen -r #To resume screen session