tacoday-api

tacoday-api is a toy project to experiment with various technologies related to using containers for deploying software, such as Docker, Triton and HashiCorp Vault.

It is a simplistic REST API server written in Node.js. It has a single endpoint, GET /wotd, that connects to the Facebook API to determine what the "word of the day" to get special deals at La Taqueria, a tacos restaurant in Vancouver.

Running a tacoday-api server

Comment settings

Regardless of how you choose to run it, tacoday-api requires a Facebook API token to connect to Facebook's API. An [App Access token](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access- tokens/#apptokens) is probably the most convenient token to us in this case. This token can be set by setting the FB_APP_TOKEN environment variable when running the server.

tacoday-api also requires the FB_APP_TARGET_PAGE environment variable to be set. It identifies which Facebook page from which to get the posts that contain the relevant information. Most of the time, it is set to LaTaqueria, which is the name of the page for the tacos joint in Vancouver mentioned earlier, but it can be set to any other page for testing or other purposes.

Standalone

FB_APP_TARGET_PAGE=LaTaqueria FB_APP_TOKEN='your_fb_api_app_access_token' node index.js | bunyan

Using bunyan is not mandatory, but it pretty-prints log messages.

Using Docker

To run the tacoday-api server using Docker, you'll first need to build the image of the container:

docker build -t your_docker_hub_username/name .

then publish the image on the Docker hub:

docker push your_docker_hub_username/name

and finally run a container using that image:

docker run --restart=always --name tacoday-api -P -d -e "FB_APP_TOKEN=your_fb_api_app_access_token" -e FB_APP_TARGET_PAGE=LaTaqueria your_docker_hub_username/tacoday-api

Using docker-compose

It is also possible to run this container, along with the associated Slack bot that can be used to query the API from a Slack channel by using the tacobot repository. That repository contains a docker-compose configuration file that can be used to create and run both the tacoday-api server and the associated taco Slack bot.