Prepare Environment

Before starting portal services locally, we need to make sure that Docker is installed. This tutorial is based on Ubuntu Linux, and I am sure that Mac OS should work the same. However, I am not sure that it will work on Windows. It would be great if someone can help to test it on the Windows environment.

Check out

We have docker-compose and config files checked into some repositories on the GitHub.com, and we need to check out these repositories. If you want to make a code change for one of the light-portal services, then you need to check out more repositories and build docker images locally.

As usual, I am using networknt under my home directory as the workspace.

cd ~/networknt
git clone https://github.com/networknt/light-docker.git
git clone https://github.com/networknt/light-config-test.git
git clone https://github.com/networknt/light-portal.git

Light-docker contains the most commonly used docker-compose files and their config files. Light-config-test contains config files and script for daily development and test/prod deployment. Light-portal contains the view that is a React SPA to access the services through the router.

/etc/hosts

When we use the consul for service discovery, we need to use the docker host network, and all the services will be bound to the same IP/host with different ports. In order to simplify the service reference and later we can use the domain name to access the SPA from the browser, let’s create a hostname lightapi.net in the /etc/hosts to point to the network address.

First, use the following command to find out your local network IP address.

ifconfig

The local IP address is 192.168.1.144 on my desktop. You cannot use the 127.0.0.1 or localhost as they mean local address within a Docker container.

Now, let’s add a line into the /etc/hosts file with sudo vi /etc/hosts

192.168.1.144   lightapi.net

Note that your local IP address might be different than mine. Please update the above line accordingly.

In the next step, we are going to start a consul container to mimic a consul cluster on a test/prod environment.