Saturday, February 1, 2020

Telescope: Nginx and Let's encrypt

So, Telescope is getting closer to become the successor for PlanetCDOT. If you still don't know what Telescope is (shame on you), check this out.

Nginx & Let's Encrypt
I spent this week researching nginx to add a reverse proxy to our staging box so we could add some cool features. Also, I worked with another contributor (@miggs125) to add Let's Encrypt so we can use SSL.

After dealing with some configuration issues, we managed to get it to work, and once we merge the necessary changes, we'll have Telescope using SSL. I think I've probably said it too many times, but once again thanks to Telescope, I had the change to learn new things: I got to learn how to setup a reverse proxy and how to add SSL to a site.

Feed endpoints
As I mentioned in previous posts, Telescope has a REST API and GraphQL. The endpoints to serve posts were implemented some time ago, but we were still lacking a way to serve feeds to our frontend. Since I collaborated adding the endpoints for posts, I thought it'd be a good idea to work on the same issue but for feeds. I added endpoints to request feeds and one feed, along with some tests for those endpoints.

GraphQL filters
I also did some work for GraphQL. Another contributor (@c3ho) is working on adding filters to our Apollo server, so our queries will be more flexible and efficient. It's a very tricky task, so I offered to help since I worked on the initial addition of Apollo to Telescope. We've made some progress and, to be honest, if he manages to include all the functionalities we want (taking advantage of some Apollo's features), the improvement will be significant. Seriously, really interesting stuff.


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