Skip to main content

Set up a web server for learning HTTP headers


Motivation


We all follow the client-server model using the HTTP protocol for most of our web apps today. In development, we simply may have a backend API server and a frontend (web pages or mobile apps) only. However, it seemed that a proxy server is always required for production. In fact, most of the hardest issues in production come from integration. The requests and responses might be modified by the proxy server. Therefore, the understanding of HTTP protocol is one of the key skills to resolve those issues.

I wanted to dive deep into HTTP with some core concepts such as caching, cookies, and CORS. I didn't intend to go quickly rather than moved slowly to have a well understanding of what I do.

Prepare a server

The easiest way is to use my laptop as a server then I can just use "localhost". I can also use ngrok to make my web server online. Finally, I use an online tool such as RedBot to check the HTTP headers.

To make it more excited though, I deployed the app on AWS EC2. It was quite easy to launch an EC2 instance by using the wizard setup of AWS. Just simply use default settings for most of the cases. I was just curious about how to creating a new VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). To understand what exactly the IPv4 address and CIDR are, I first started to grab some knowledge about those topics by watching the following videos on YouTube


Next, I tried to create and do configure a virtual private network using Cisco Packet Tracer. I needed to configure IP address for involved devices: routers, servers, and laptop. Also, I did configure the routing tables for each router so that I could send packets among devices.

Coding

I used Express for my web server simply serving static files. I configured the HTTP header easily through passing the options of "express.static" middleware.

Deployment

Docker is my favourite tool for deployment. I created an image for my container running on my EC2 instance which I have already installed Docker. I also applied some best practices of Node.js and Docker. I built and pushed my Docker image into Docker Hub so that I could pull the image within the EC2 instance.

Happy coding!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My impression of Google I/O 2016

I have not yet had a chance to attend this event but I just watched it on Youtube  as usual. :) Google Assistant You might be very familiar to Google Now if you're Android fan. I saw that Google Assistant is like an upgrade to Google Now. It looks smarter because we are able to make a conversation with Google rather than just saying "Ok Google" and getting the tasks done as Google Now. That means Google Assistant can understand our personal words in our contexts. For example: I : Who is Google CEO? Google : Sundar Pichai I : Show me his awards  => Here I don't need to say "Show me Sundar Pichai awards", because I don't know to pronounce his name correctly. :) I am thinking about that we can compare Google Assistant to Siri of Apple. Google Home At Google I/O 2015 last year, Sundar mentioned about working on a exciting project with Internet of Things and I think Google Home is a result. Working with Google Assistant, Google ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Selenium - Override javascript functions to ignore downloading process

I have got an issue with downloading process on IE 8. This browser blocks my automatic-download functionality on my app so that I could not work with my test case any more after that. In my case, I didn't care about the file is downloaded or not, I just focus on the result after downloading process finished successfully. Therefore, I found a solution to ignore this process so that I can work normally. I use Primefaces, here is the remote command to trigger the download process <p:remoteCommand name="cmdGenerateDocument" actionListener="#{logic.onGenerateDocument}" update="xrflDocumentCreationPanel" oncomplete="clickDownloadButton();"/> The following is my test case: @Test public void shouldUpdateStep6ToWarningIfStep1IsValidAfterFinished(){ MainPage mainPage = new MainPage(); waitForLoading(mainPage.getDriver()); EmployeeDetailPage empDetailPage = new EmployeeDetailPage(); waitForLoading(empDetailPage.getDriver()); e...
Post a Comment
Read more

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or  here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sharing a virtualenv across several Python projects using Pipenv

There is a standard library for all projects in Python. However, several projects don’t always have the same dependencies all the time. That is where virtual environments come to play. You can follow this official document to use two separated tools  virtualenv and pip to  fulfill that need. My preferred alternative is to use pipenv . Pipenv is easy to use and convenient. The following are my steps to make a shared virtualenv for my all projects which requires the same dependencies. Step 1. Create an isolated virtualenv. python -m venv my-shared-env Step 2. Create a symbolic link to the created virtualenv. cd project_1 ln -s ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/my-shared-env .venv I have encountered the following issue at step 1. FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '{my_project_path}/.venv/bin/pip': '{my_project_path}/.venv/bin/pip' The root cause was I tried to create virtualenv by running pipenv install and renaming the generated virtualenv to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The culture war at the heart of open source

I enjoyed reading this post: https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source Here is my highlight: If you ask a random developer what “open source” means to them, you won’t often hear “software that follows the Open Source Definition.” If you ask them “what’s the difference between free software and open source software,” you’ll often hear “aren’t those the same thing?” or “you can charge money for open source software, it’s not always free.” You may even hear “it’s on GitHub.” In brief, there was a man Richard Stallman (and his team) starting a project called "GNU Project" in 1983. This project was about to develop a free software system. The term "free" here meant "freedom", not only about the price. The Free Software Foundation appeared to support this project. But then, the term "free software" was so ambiguous. "In addition, the ambiguity of the term “free software” was seen as discouraging busine...
Post a Comment
Read more