title: "Playing with Web Services" date: 2020-04-15T12:24:13-04:00 aliases:

• "/posts/playing-with-web-services" draft: false

There's been very little movement on this website in the last couple months. Not because I've dropped its development, and certainly not because I've been lacking for free time. Rather, I've been playing with my private network.

I'm generally uncomfortable with standing up web services if I don't thoroughly understand the risks and consequences. (That's the single biggest reason for my selection of CGit over GitLab, gitea, etc.) And this posed a significant challenge to running PHP. The configuration file was thousands of lines long!

So I did the only reasonable thing and wrote my own php.ini while skimming the entire PHP manual.

By now, I've stood up a DNS server (via dnsmasq), a SQL server (including MariaDB and phpMyAdmin), RainLoop, and NextCloud. I'm generally satisfied where things stand now, so I'm moving on.

Next steps?

1. Encapsulation through Ubuntu Core and snaps.
2. Custom web APIs, probably using Flask. Namely, I want to build a bridge between my SQL server and a FullCalendar-compatible JSON feed.
3. Document everything on my wiki, in at least two ways (system configuration and snap configuration).