Book Image

Hands-On Server-Side Web Development with Swift

By : Angus Yeung
Book Image

Hands-On Server-Side Web Development with Swift

By: Angus Yeung

Overview of this book

This book is about building professional web applications and web services using Swift 4.0 and leveraging two popular Swift web frameworks: Vapor 3.0 and Kitura 2.5. In the first part of this book, we’ll focus on the creation of basic web applications from Vapor and Kitura boilerplate projects. As the web apps start out simple, more useful techniques, such as unit test development, debugging, logging, and the build and release process, will be introduced to readers. In the second part, we’ll learn different aspects of web application development with server-side Swift, including setting up routes and controllers to process custom client requests, working with template engines such as Leaf and Stencil to create dynamic web content, beautifying the content with Bootstrap, managing user access with authentication framework, and leveraging the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) abstraction layer (Vapor’s Fluent and Kitura’s Kuery) to perform database operations. Finally, in the third part, we’ll develop web services in Swift and build our API Gateway, microservices and database backend in a three-tier architecture design. Readers will learn how to design RESTful APIs, work with asynchronous processes, and leverage container technology such as Docker in deploying microservices to cloud hosting services such as Vapor Cloud and IBM Cloud.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Reviewing Vapor-generated files

After using the preceding steps to create a boilerplate helloWorld project, use the ls -a command in the helloWorld project directory to list all files and child directories:

# List all files and directories, including the hidden ones
ls -a

The -a flag is used here so you can view all files, including hidden files and directories:

.                 .build          .gitignore                  Package.swift         README.md            Tests               cloud.yml
.. .git Package.resolved Public Sources circle.yml

Vapor generates some hidden directories, such as .build and .git.

The .build directory contains all the dependencies and temporary files when you build your project. If you execute the vapor clean Vapor CLI command, the .build directory will be removed. Then you have to use vapor build to fetch...