This is a repository to house a technical task for Chip. The above code achieves a dockerised RESTful API service, with basic JWT authentication.

The above code is a dockerised solution composed out of 3 main services: Nginx, MongoDB & PHP-FPM. The Nginx and MongoDB image used are official images, whereas the PHP-FPM image used is a custom-made image that I've uploaded to my Docker Hub - it compiles PHP with Phalcon, MongoDB and PCNTL extensions. Which are all vital to making the above API work. To run the container, simple execute the following:

$ cd dist/
$ docker-compose up -d

An administrator account has also been made with the following credentials:

Username: admin

Password: b4nnKK6UqsCRJbDf

It is also recommended to add the following to your /etc/hosts file, especially if you'll be using the test classes.

127.0.0.1 phalcon.local

Authenticate a user

Description: Authenticates a user by accepting a username and password.

Response: JWT Token

Authentication Header Required: None.

Request: POST /auth/login

Refreshing an expired token

Description: Refreshes an expired token within the refresh range.

Response: JWT Token

Authentication Header Required: Authentication: Bearer <token>

Request: GET /auth/refresh

Listing the user's message history

Description: Lists all the message history for the current user.

Response: messages (array of messages), requests (number of requests made)

Authentication Header Required: Authentication: Bearer <token>

Request: GET /api/messages/history

Adding a new message

Description: Asynchronously adds a message to the database.

Response: success on success, error on error.

Authentication Header Required: Authentication: Bearer <token>

Request: POST /api/messages/new

The PHP-FPM docker image also encapsulates PCNTL which is used to achieve asynchronicity for the new message endpoint. Upon receiving a request, the function spawns a child process in parallel.

Although the above seemed to be the best option, there are other ways of achieving asynchronicity:

• Using a message queue like Beanstalkd or RabbitMQ
• Asynchronously calling requests through the function with a fast connection time out
• Using an external library like ReactPHP that has built-in asynchronicity.
• Using HHVM / Hack

To run PHPUnit Tests, simply enter the dist/ directory, and execute the following:

composer test

This will run REST tests using Guzzle and call each endpoint, using an individual test user.

• The above code utilises a framework called PHP-JWT, from Firebase's repository. This ensures that all JWTs are encoded and decoded in the same fashion.
• The ports on MongoDB are left open for testing purposes - they can be closed for production.
• Nginx uses the recommended configuration specified by Phalcon