README.md

Photo API Bash sample

This directory contains an example bash script which authenticates with the API Gateway and queries the Photo API for a photo by identifier. It makes use of curl to interact with the Photo API and jq to parse the access token response.

Running the example

With both jq and curl installed locally, and ../secrets.env populated as specified in ../secrets.example.env, the script can be run using:

./example.sh <identifier> > example.jpeg

For example, the following would fetch a photo of the person with the CRSid wgd23:

./example.sh wgd23@v1.person.identifiers.cam.ac.uk > wgd23.jpeg

The example can also be run using Docker and Docker Compose, which does not require curl or jq to be installed locally:

docker-compose run bash-example <identifier>

This will output the fetched photo to ./output/example.jpeg.

If a photo cannot be found for the given person the script will exit with a non-successful exit code and print a curl 404 error message to stderr.

Interactions with the Photo API

The example script contains all commands used to query the Photo API and includes comments indicating the purpose of each block. The script fetches a new access token using curl, making use of the credentials defined in ../secrets.env, and then uses this access token to query the Photo API, again making use of curl. If the Photo API or access token request fail an error will be logged and the script will exit with an unsuccessful error code.