{{ SERVICE_NAME }}


This is a specification for the {{ SERVICE_NAME }} API.

• specification/ This Open API Specification describes the endpoints, methods and messages exchanged by the API. Use it to generate interactive documentation; the contract between the API and its consumers.
• sandbox/ This NodeJS application implements a mock implementation of the service. Use it as a back-end service to the interactive documentation to illustrate interactions and concepts. It is not intended to provide an exhaustive/faithful environment suitable for full development and testing.
• scripts/ Utilities helpful to developers of this specification.
• proxies/ Live (connecting to another service) and sandbox (using the sandbox container) Apigee API Proxy definitions.

Consumers of the API will find developer documentation on the NHS Digital Developer Hub.

Contributing

Contributions to this project are welcome from anyone, providing that they conform to the [guidelines for contribution](https://github.com/NHSDigital/{{ SERVICE_NAME }}/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) and the [community code of conduct](https://github.com/NHSDigital/{{ SERVICE_NAME }}/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).

Licensing

This code is dual licensed under the MIT license and the OGL (Open Government License). Any new work added to this repository must conform to the conditions of these licenses. In particular this means that this project may not depend on GPL-licensed or AGPL-licensed libraries, as these would violate the terms of those libraries' licenses.

The contents of this repository are protected by Crown Copyright (C).

Development

Requirements

• make
• nodejs + npm/yarn
• poetry
• Java 8+

Install

$ make install

Updating hooks

You can install some pre-commit hooks to ensure you can't commit invalid spec changes by accident. These are also run in CI, but it's useful to run them locally too.

$ make install-hooks

Environment Variables

Various scripts and commands rely on environment variables being set. These are documented with the commands.

💡 Consider using direnv to manage your environment variables during development and maintaining your own .envrc file - the values of these variables will be specific to you and/or sensitive.

Make commands

There are make commands that alias some of this functionality:

• lint -- Lints the spec and code
• publish -- Outputs the specification as a single file into the build/ directory
• serve -- Serves a preview of the specification in human-readable format

Testing

Each API and team is unique. We encourage you to use a test/ folder in the root of the project, and use whatever testing frameworks or apps your team feels comfortable with. It is important that the URL your test points to be configurable. We have included some stubs in the Makefile for running tests.

VS Code Plugins

• openapi-lint resolves links and validates entire spec with the 'OpenAPI Resolve and Validate' command
• OpenAPI (Swagger) Editor provides sidebar navigation

Emacs Plugins

• openapi-yaml-mode provides syntax highlighting, completion, and path help

Speccy

Speccy A handy toolkit for OpenAPI, with a linter to enforce quality rules, documentation rendering, and resolution.

Speccy does the lifting for the following npm scripts:

• test -- Lints the definition
• publish -- Outputs the specification as a single file into the build/ directory
• serve -- Serves a preview of the specification in human-readable format

(Workflow detailed in a post on the developerjack blog.)

💡 The publish command is useful when uploading to Apigee which requires the spec as a single file.

Caveats

Swagger UI

Swagger UI unfortunately doesn't correctly render $refs in examples, so use speccy serve instead.

Apigee Portal

The Apigee portal will not automatically pull examples from schemas, you must specify them manually.

Platform setup

As currently defined in your proxies folder, your proxies do pretty much nothing. Telling Apigee how to connect to your backend requires a Target Server, which you should call named {{ SERVICE_NAME }}-target. Our Target Servers defined in the api-management-infrastructure repository.

💡 For Sandbox-running environments (test) these need to be present for successful deployment but can be set to empty/dummy values.

Detailed folder walk through

To get started developing your API use this template repo alongside guidance provided by the API Producer Zone confluence

/.github:

This folder contains templates that can be customised for items such as opening pull requests or issues within the repo

/.github/workflows: This folder contains templates for github action workflows such as:

• pr-lint.yaml: This workflow template shows how to link Pull Request's to Jira tickets and runs when a pull request is opened.
• continuous-integration.yml: This workflow template shows how to publish a Github release when pushing to master.

/azure:

Contains templates defining Azure Devops pipelines. By default the following pipelines are available:

• azure-build-pipeline.yml: Assembles the contents of your repository into a single file ("artifact") on Azure Devops and pushes any containers to our Docker registry. By default this pipeline is enabled for all branches.
• azure-pr-pipeline.yml: Deploys ephemeral versions of your proxy/spec to Apigee (and docker containers on AWS) to internal environments. You can run automated and manual tests against these while you develop. By default this pipeline will deploy to internal-dev, but the template can be amended to add other environments as required.
• azure-release-pipeline.yml: Deploys the long-lived version of your pipeline to internal and external environments, typically when you merge to master.

The project.yml file needs to be populated with your service names to make them available to the pipelines

/azure/templates: Here you can define reusable actions, such as running tests, and call these actions during Azure Devops pipelines. 

/proxies:

This folder contains files relating to your Apigee API proxy.

There are 2 folders /live and /sandbox allowing you to define a different proxy for sandbox use. By default, this sandbox proxy is implemented to route to the sandbox target server (code for this sandbox is found under /sandbox of this template repo)

Within the live/apiproxy and sandbox/apiproxy folders are:

/proxies/default.xml: Defines the proxy's Flows. Flows define how the proxy should handle different requests. By default, _ping and _status endpoint flows are defined. See the APM confluence for more information on how the _ping and _status endpoints work.

/policies: Populated with a set of standard XML Apigee policies that can be used in flows.

/resources/jsc: Snippets of javascript code that are used in Apigee Javascript policies. For more info about Javascript policies see here

/targets: The XMLs within these folders set up target definitions which allow connections to external target servers. The sandbox target definition is implemented to route to the sandbox target server (code for this sandbox is found under /sandbox of this template repo). For more info on setting up a target server see the API Producer Zone confluence

/sandbox:

This folder contains a template for a sandbox API. This example is a NodeJs application running in Docker. The application handles a few simple endpoints such as: /_ping, /health, /_status, /hello and some logging logic. For more information about building sandbox APIs see the API Producer Zone confluence.

/scripts:

Contains useful scripts that are used throughout the project, for example in Makefile and Github workflows

/specification:

Create an OpenAPI Specification to document your API. For more information about developing specifications see the API Producer Zone confluence.

/tests:

End to End tests. These tests are written in Python and use the PyTest test runner. Before running these tests you will need to set environment variables. The test_endpoint.py file provides a template of how to set up tests which test your api endpoints. For more information about testing your API see the API Producer Zone confluence.

Makefile:

Useful make targets to get started including: installing dependencies and running smoke tests.

ecs-proxies-containers.yml and ecs-proxies-deploy.yml:

These files are required to deploy containers alongside your Apigee proxy during the Azure Devops azure-build-pipeline. In this template repo we are deploying our sandbox container which is used as the target server for the sandbox proxy.

ecs-proxies-containers.yml: The path to a container's Dockerfile is defined here. This path needs to be defined to allow containers to be pushed to our repository during the azure-build-pipeline.

ecs-proxies-deploy.yml : Here you can define config for your container deployment.  

For more information about deploying ECS containers see the API Producer Zone confluence.

manifest_template.yml:

This file defines 2 dictionaries of fields that are required for the Apigee deployment. For more info see the API Producer Zone confluence.

Package management:

This template uses poetry for python dependency management, and uses these files: poetry.lock, poetry.toml, pyproject.toml.

Node dependencies of this template project and some npm scripts are listed in: package.json, package-lock.json.