Installation

Dependencies Docker and Docker-Compose installed and available. Ruby and Rails versions are defined in the Dockerfile but don't need to be modified

In a terminal where the current working directory is this application's repo, referred to as search-api from here on forward, perform the following steps:

1. Copy the .env file that I will provide to the top level of the git repo. The file would be at search-api/.env
2. Run docker-compose up in search-api
3. In a separate terminal in the same directory run docker-compose run web rake db:create and then docker-compose run web rake db:migrate
4. The application homepage should now be available at http://localhost:3003 but since it's primarily an Rails API application there won't be viewable web pages at the endpoints.

Using the API

Note because of authentication requirements any HTTP request will fail with an unauthorized response. To remedy this see the authentication section below for how to authenticate. Ideally there is a Postman collection that allows you go through the API usage flow.

Restaurant Search API (/v1/search)

The restaurant search API endpoint can be found at http://localhost:3003/v1/search

Restaurant Search API (/v1/photo_lookup)

The Google Places Photos endpoint doesn't appear to support requesting a photo_url. They return an id labeled photo_reference which can be used to create a query that would retrieve a photo. Unfortunately the query to retrieve the photo includes the API key as query params and therefore I decided, for security reasons, to create a photo lookup api that does not expose the API key.

Instead the api at /v1/photo_lookup takes the same parameters that the google photo api would use but without the API key visible

Rather than having something like the following:

"photo_url": {google_photos_endpoint}?key={API-key}&{rest-of-params}....

we have a call that hides this information

"photo_url": localhost:3003/v1/photo_lookup?{rest-of-params}

where the API key is still hidden but in the backend there is a call to the Google API

Authentication

This application uses devise-token-auth for authentication. See https://devise-token-auth.gitbook.io/devise-token-auth/usage for general usage

Below is information on how to successfully place an API call for the search endpoints. You will need the following 4 authorization headers

• access-token
• client
• expiry
• uid

Of these 4 the headers, access-token and expiry, will expire and have to rotated out with new values from the response of each api call to the search endpoints

A user can be created by sending a POST call localhost:3003/auth/ and providing the following fields:

• email
• password
• password_confirmation
• confirm_success_url

The response to user creation will include the authorization headers in the response headers.

If you lose the authentication headers you can retrieve new authorization headers by doing a POST to localhost:3003/auth/sign_in with email and password as params. Make sure you update the following headers (uid should stay the same) if you have an existing api call template:

• client
• expiry
• access-token