Simple Privacy Service

Description

git repo

Simple server for privacy related stuff. This is never intended for production, just to mock a secret management REST API for locally running node js apps.

sps privacy.env

Written in Typescript, this is very rudimentary Service Controller pattern for a REST API service. Uses the yarn package manager. All done with javascript classes, interfaces and strong type checking with minimal use of node js modules beyond the builtin set. There are no eslint problems.

Input file is a .env file such as privacy.env or any file in the format suitable to module node-env-file with lines like SOMEKEY=secretstring and nothing else. The privacy.env is loaded setting the env variables for the sps instance when it runs as a server on http://127.0.0.1:3000. The REST API service returns values from process.env.

I utilize the forever npm module to run the service in the background with the follow powershell cli command run in the project directory:

forever start --id "sps" -v --fifo --append --workingDir . -l $home\\logs\\sps.log   lib/index.js privacy.env

In the powershell $profile, I defined this shortcuts:

function sps {forever start --id "sps" -v --fifo --append --workingDir . -l $home\\logs\\sps.log   lib/index.js privacy.env }
function spsStop {forever stopall}

Code Structure

• SimplePrivacyController.ts - creates an http.server with the http.createServer() class method supplying the requestListener() function to the server as a callback. The controller is invoked with each REST API request, parses the route and parameters and calls the service appropriately. The controllor instatiates both the server and the service separately.
• SimplePrivacyService.ts - a class implementing the various API calls supported by the Simple Privacy Service.
• SimplePrivacyServer.ts - creates an instance of the node builtin class http.server for simple http requests. The listenerFunction is provided in the constructor parameters. The listenNow() method is used to start the server listener.

Steps to create

Using simple Typescript node.js http.server application server

mkdir pp-simple-privacy-server
yarn init
git init
yarn add typescript -D
# also used npm module express-generator-typescript to learn from,
# but in a different folder. It helped to figure out the minimal tsconfig.json
mkdir lib  # for the tsc compiler output .js files
mkdir src  # for the .ts files

Special Notes

This was my first attempt at a minimalist Typescript node.js server-side app with little to no node modules or frameworks. There were some noob mysteries I had to solve along the way.

A note of gratitude for this blog without which I would not have figured out how to set types for the old node-env-file module.

Be sure to .bind() methods like SimplePrivacyController.requestListener() in the constructor() to avoid problems with this. Found that answer here, a true right of passage.