Technical challenge - Aidan Johnson

My Approach

Initial setup

• Made a fork of the repo and cloned locally.
• Installed Golang and Docker. I opted to use my personal machine and not work machine so that these steps would be necessary.
• Ran the api as is using go run ./app/main.go to check everything was working as expected.

Setting up my environment variables

• Initially I made an .env file to hold my environment variables, however os package does not support loading environment variables this way.
  • Realising this I temporarily set the environment variable APP_STATUS using os.Setenv() function to test.
  • I kept my .env as I would later use this when setting environment variables in docker.
• Added .gitignore and added .env to this.
  • This isn't necessary but is good practice if we were to be storing secret keys, DB variables, etc.

Dockerising

• As I was setting up on my personal windows machine as opposed to my work mac, it was necessary to enable "Windows Subsystem for Linux" and then use "WSL2".
  • After doing this my Docker engine was successfully running.
• Next I put together a Dockerfile following the Docker docs for Go, I opted for a multi-stage build as this would result in a smaller image.
• Next I added docker-compose.yml. This isn't necessary for a single container application but is cleaner and allowed me to call my .env.
  • Calling environment variables from a git ignored file and not setting them in a docker configurations prevents exposing them in the repo if it were to be publicly visible.

Running my dockerised application

• After cloning the repo, copy .env.example and rename the copy .env.
• In .env set APP_STATUS to OK.
• Boot up Docker and ensure the engine is running.
• In the root of the project folder run docker-compose up in a command window.
• The container will be now available at http://localhost:8080/.
• Back in the command window ctrl+c to stop the container.