Message Bird

Implementation of a simple API that posts messages to Message Bird API.

Technologies used

• PHP 7.1
• NGINX
• Redis 3.2.10
• Docker

Setup

1. Execute composer update to download project's dependencies.
2. Execute php vendor/bin/phing and provide the values that you are asked. This is used to generate the config files and the docker-compose.yml with values that we do not want to commit. You can see that 2 new files appear in the config/ : MessageBird.ini and Redis.ini and the docker-compose.yml.
   • Phing variables:
     • NGINX_PORT = Host's port that is going to accept incoming HTTP requests (defaults to 8558).
     • MESSAGE_BIRD_API_KEY = Message Bird API key
     • REDIS_SCHEME = Redis Scheme (defaults to tcp).
     • REDIS_HOST = Redis Host (defaults to 'redis' as 'redis' is the name of the Redis service in docker-compose.yml).
     • REDIS_PORT = Redis Port (defaults to 6379).
     • DOCKER_HOST_REDIS_PORT = Host's port for redis (defaults to 6379). This variable is used from docker-compose to start the redis container.
3. Execute docker-compose up -d. It will pull and create 3 containers: nginx, php-fpm and redis. Now, you are ready to accept connections to the API and push messages to a redis queue.
4. Make a POST request to http://0.0.0.0:%%NGINX_PORT%%/message. If it is successful you should see a respond with message: 'Request successful'. That results in a message pushed into the Redis queue, waiting to be picked up by a worker.
5. Now, you need to instantiate a worker in order to start sending messages to MessageBird. You can execute docker exec -it messagebird_php_1 php /usr/share/nginx/html/workers/MessageBirdWorker.php. This command starts a worker with an interactive shell. You can instantiate as many as you want. The throughput is 1 call/second.

How it works

API

The API itself has the /message endpoint where it accepts POST requests. First, it validates the fields of the request body. If everything, is valid, pushes the message to be sent to MessageBird to a Redis queue. Goal of the API is to queue the message and respond as fast as possible to the request.

Message Worker

The worker is pretty simple. It is responsible for popping messages from Redis queue and sending them to MessageBird API.