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Akka HTTP microservice

This template lets you learn about:

  • starting standalone HTTP server,
  • handling simple, file-based configuration,
  • logging,
  • routing,
  • deconstructing requests,
  • unmarshaling JSON entities to Scala's case classes,
  • marshaling Scala's case classes to JSON responses,
  • error handling,
  • issuing requests to external services,
  • testing with mocking of external services.

It focuses on the HTTP part of the microservices and doesn't talk about database connection handling, etc.

Check out the code and don't forget to comment or ask questions on Github and Twitter.

Below you will find a brief tutorial about how the service works. You can:

  • learn what a microservice is,
  • check what our microservice does,
  • or you can go straight to the code.

What is a microservice?

Microservice is a tiny standalone program that can be used as a component of a bigger distributed system. Microservices:

  • are short and concise,
  • process only one bounded domain.

In order to be readable and rewritable, code in microservices is usually very short and brief. It's usually responsible for processing only one type of data (in this project it is IP location data). They rarely use the high level of abstraction over databases, networking, and other components. It all makes them easier to understand and easier to reuse in multiple projects.

Next: What does the example microservice do?

Geolocation of IP addresses

Our example microservice has two main features. It should:

  • locate an IP address,
  • compute distances between locations of two IP addresses.

It should do all that by exposing two HTTP JSON endpoints:

  • GET /ip/X.X.X.X — which returns given IP's geolocation data,
  • POST /ip — which returns distance between two IPs geolocations given JSON request {"ip1": "X.X.X.X", "ip2": "Y.Y.Y.Y"}.

Next: Let's see how to run it!

Running the template

Issue $ sbt "~reStart" to see the microservice compiling and running.

You can check out where are Google DNS servers by opening http://localhost:9000/ip/8.8.8.8. As you can see in the URL, the browser will send GET request to the first endpoint.

You can also check our endpoints using curl command line tool:

$ curl http://localhost:9000/ip/8.8.8.8

and

$ curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' http://localhost:9000/ip -d '{"ip1": "8.8.8.8", "ip2": "8.8.4.4"}'

for the second endpoint.

If you don't have curl installed you can install it from the source, using your OS package manager or you can use Postman REST Client in your browser.

Next: Let's see how our responses look like

The Geolocation IP responses

Responses should look like that:

{
  "city": "Mountain View",
  "query": "8.8.8.8",
  "country": "United States",
  "lon": -122.0881,
  "lat": 37.3845
}

for the first endpoint and

{
  "distance": 4347.6243474947,
  "ip1Info": {
    "city": "Mountain View",
    "query": "8.8.8.8",
    "country": "United States",
    "lon": -122.0881,
    "lat": 37.3845
  },
  "ip2Info": {
    "city": "Norwell",
    "query": "93.184.216.34",
    "country": "United States",
    "lon": -70.8228,
    "lat": 42.1508
  }
}

In the sbt output you can see the request/response logs the app generates.

Next: Now as we know what our microservice does, let's open up the code.

Code overview

There are four significant parts of the code. These are:

The build scripts let SBT download all the dependencies for our project (including akka-http). They are described inside the build scripts part of the tutorial.

Configuration for our microservice is described in the configuration part of the tutorial.

The code implementing our microservice's logic is described in the "microservice's code" section.

Build scripts

build.sbt and plugins.sbt hold the configuration for our build procedure.

build.sbt

build.sbt provides our project with typical meta-data like project names and versions, declares Scala compiler flags and lists the dependencies.

  • akka-actor is the cornerstone of Actor system that akka-http and akka-stream are based on.
  • akka-stream is the library implementing Reactive Streams using Akka actors — a framework for building reactive applications.
  • akka-http is core library for creating reactive HTTP streams.
  • circe-core is a library for handling JSONs.
  • circe-generic is an extension to circe-core that offers auto generation of JSON encoders and decoders for case classes.
  • akka-http-circe is a library for marshaling circe's JSONs into requests and responses.
  • akka-testkit is a library that helps testing akka.
  • akka-http-testkit is a library that helps testing akka-http routing and responses.
  • scalatest is a standard Scala testing library.

plugins.sbt

There are four plugins used in our project. These are:

  • sbt-revolver which is helpful for development. It recompiles and runs our microservice every time the code in files changes (~reStart sbt command). Notice that it is initialized inside build.sbt.
  • sbt-assembly is a great library that lets us deploy our microservice as a single .jar file.
  • sbt-native-packager is needed by Heroku to stage the app.
  • sbt-updates provides a handy sbt command dependencyUpdates that list dependencies that could be updated.

Next: As we know what are the dependencies of our project, let's see what is the minimal configuration needed for the project.

Configuration

The seed configuration for our microservice is available in the application.conf. It consists of three things:

  • akka — Akka configuration,
  • http — HTTP server configuration,
  • services — external endpoints configuration.

The Akka part of the configuration will let us see more log messages on the console when developing the microservice.

HTTP interface needs to be given an interface that it will run on and port that will listen for new HTTP requests.

Our microservice uses external service http://ip-api.com/ to find where the IP we're trying to find is.

When deploying microservice as a .jar file, one can overwrite the configuration values when running the jar.

java -jar microservice.jar -Dservices.ip-api.port=8080

Using a configuration management system is also recommended as the amount of variables rises quickly. It is hard to maintain configuration files across the more complex microservice architecture.

Next: Let's see how is our configuration used in the code.

Microservice's code

All of the code is held in AkkaHttpMicroservice.scala. We can distinguish 6 parts of the code. These are:

  • the imports,
  • type declarations and business domain,
  • protocols,
  • networking logic,
  • routes,
  • main App declaration.

The names, order, and configuration are not standardized, but the list above will make it easier for us to reason about this code.

We won't get into many details about imports. The only thing worth remembering is that there are many implicit values imported and one should be cautious when removing the imports, as many of them can be marked as unused by one's IDE.

This section of the tutorial explains:

  • How to use Scala types in HTTP microservice?
  • How to do external HTTP requests?
  • How to declare HTTP routes?
  • What do our tests do?

Scala types and protocols

To see the usage of Scala types and protocols inside our microservice open up the AkkaHttpMicroservice.scala. We have three type of types there:

  • IpApiResponse and IpApiResponseStatus — a case class (with dedicated enum) that models external API response.
  • IpPairSummaryRequest — a case class that models our JSON HTTP request's body.
  • IpInfo and IpInfoSummary — case classes are used as an intermediate form of data that can be converted to response JSON.

Modeling requests

akka-http can unmarshal any JSON request into a type. This way we can validate incoming requests and pass only the ones that are well-formed and complete. The easiest way to model requests is to create algebraic data types and instrument them with validations in a constructor (typical methods include using Scala's Predef library with its require method). Example:

 case class IpPairSummaryRequest(...) {
  ...
  require(ip1..split('.').map(_.toInt).map({s => s >= 0 && s <= 255}).fold(true)(_ && _), "wrong IP address")
  ...
}

Forming JSON response

One of the great features of akka-http is response marshaling. The responses will be implicitly converted into JSON whether they are Option[T], Future[T], etc. Proper errors and response codes will also be generated.

Using this feature requires:

  • Having contents of ErrorAccumulatingCirceSupport in scope,
  • declaring implicit JSON converters (here it's done inside Protocols trait).

Next: Making external HTTP requests.

Making an external HTTP request

Handling communication with external HTTP services is done inside Service trait.

Making an HTTP request

Making a proper HTTP request using akka-http leverages the Reactive Streams approach. It requires:

  • defining an external service HTTP connection flow,
  • defining a proper HTTP request,
  • defining this request as a source,
  • connecting the request source through external service HTTP connection flow with so-called Sink.

In order for the flow to run, we also need FlowMaterializer and ExecutionContext. After the request is done, we get the standard HttpResponse that we need to handle.

Handling the response

Handling HttpResponse consists of:

  • checking if the request was successful,
  • unmarshaling HTTP Entity into a case class.

The unmarshaling uses the protocol implicit values defined earlier. Unmarshaling works using Future[T]s so we can always handle any errors and exceptions raised by our validation logic.

Next: Declaring routes and responding to HTTP requests.

Routing and running server

Routing directives can be found in the Service trait.

akka-http provides lots of useful routing directives. One can use multiple directives by nesting them inside one another. The request will go deeper down the nested structure if only it complies with each of the directive's requirements. Some directives filter the requests while others help to deconstruct it. If the request passes all directives, the final complete(...) {...} block gets evaluated as a HttpResponse.

Routing & filtering directives

Directives responsible for routing are:

  • pathPrefix("ip") — filters the request by its relative URI beginning,
  • path("ip"/"my") — filters the request by its part of the URI relative to the hostname or pathPrefix directive in which it is nested,
  • get — filters GET requests,
  • post — filters POST requests,
  • and many more.

Deconstructing request

Directives that let us deconstruct the request:

  • entity(as[IpPairSummaryRequest]) — unmarshals HTTP entity into an object; useful for handling JSON requests,
  • formFields('field1, 'field2) — extracts form fields form POST request,
  • headerValueByName("X-Auth-Token") — extracts a header value by its name,
  • path("member" / Segment / "books") — the Segment part of the directive lets us extract a string from the URI,
  • and many more.

Directives can provide us with some values we can use later to prepare a response:

headerValueByName("X-Requester-Name") { requesterName =>
  Ok("Hi " + requesterName)
}

There are other directives like logRequestResult that don't change the flow of the request. We can also create our own directives whenever needed.

Building a response

If we use JSON marshaling, it is very easy to build a JSON response. All we need to do is to return marshalable type in complete directive (ex. String, Future[T], Option[T], StatusCode, etc.). Most of the HTTP status codes are already implemented in akka-http. Some of them are:

  • Ok — 200 response
  • NotFound — 404 response which is automatically generated when None is returned.
  • Unauthorized — 401 response
  • Bad Request — 400 response

Next: Testing akka-http.

Tests

Check out simple tests that we prepared and don't forget to run them on your computer (sbt test)!

The interesting parts of the tests are:

Next: Tutorial summary.

Summary

And that's it! We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned how to write a small microservice that uses akka-http, responds to GET and POST requests with JSON, and connects with external services through HTTP endpoint.

Be sure to ping us on Github or Twitter if you liked it or if you have any questions.