Making api.snlx.net

Requirements

After failing twice at setting-up-api and not finding a good ctr-os-4-api, I've come up with a good (I think) idea of what I want the API to look like and what I want it to do.

My publishing workflow has a ton of friction, that's why I update the site like once in a decade. I want to get rid of that in the simplest way possible. That means

centralizing on one note-taking system, see why-obsi
making custom tools for that system

The simplest set of custom tools I could come up with is

a bridge for obsidian that pushes private notes to the server and public notes to github, see mk-bridge
a server that stores private notes, see the rest of this note

My primary requirement for the server is simplicity, so it

runs alpine linux
doesn't give me shell access
doesn't have a container engine
runs a single management app (the same app that serves secret notes)
is stateless, wipes the permanent files at reboot

The management app needs to

mostly work with HTTP requests
do basic auth (I'll use a UUID for an API key and regenerate it at every reboot, I mean it should be fine because zellij is doing that for their web portal)
manage child processes (coturn, peerjs)
store files
work with WS a little

The endpoints

GET /status switches to a WS with the status updates
POST /status?pass=...&action=...&link=...&location=...&duration=... updates the status
POST /upgrade?pass=... upgrades the server
GET /file?id=... loads a file
POST /file?pass=...&id=... saves a file

Status updates are the "Currently..." thing on my homepage (when I implement that).

More on the server being a backup: it kind of is. It has a copy of my vault (why-obsi, that vault), but deletes it at reboot and must not differ from any other device (the reboots make sure of that).

More on GET /file?id=..., the UI for it is https://snlx.net/secret. You go on that page, enter the UUID of a secret file, it goes to the server, requests a bunch of HTML, that HTML can contain links to other secret files which you can then visit. This is so I can have work / uni files that are accessible by a link, but not public.

Init

I was going to try gleam, but look at what it needs to build and run:

erlang
gleam (obviously)
rebar3
git

And the build is multiple commands. I want simplicity, so I'll use deno instead. The primary thing I'm loosing is scalability, but I currently have zero users anyway so it's not a problem. I don't want to optimize for a potential future that may never come, I want to build a simple thing now.

Deno.serve is quite nice for simple apps like this, auth was done in no time. I'll be running this on a server without SSH, so I need a way to get the API key out of it. One reasonable way to do that is to generate a qr code, print it in the terminal, and scan it. There are a lot of libraries for deno that do that, I've just settled on the first one I found that looked okay.

File uploads were fun because I couldn't figure out if

the File object can give me a readable stream (it can, file.stream())
Deno.writeFile would accept that stream (it would)

Then I wanted to test it, so I made a UI. Spent too much time on that tbh.

Where did half the day go?

I didn't plan to make a UI. But... https://api.snlx.net it will make debugging a bit nicer.

Evening 2026-01-06 update

I think the actual server is done, though I haven't deployed it yet. I'll try to get back to this 2026-01-10.

Deploying the server (2026-01-10)

The bootstrap already exists, see setting up api for that. I'll test that in a local VM one last time and then move on to the real thing.

I ended up running into a problem with github serving an older version of the bootstrap script, this is a known thing and the simplest solution for me is to move the script into the main site repo. I've also made it look a bit better by adding comments did you know ash has multiline comments? This is a trick I like to use now, you can make a file that is interpreted in different ways by different environments:

: '
<h1>Html here</h1>
'

echo "and bash here"

The message is generated using figlet api.snlx.net -f cybermedium.

Now all that's left is to set up caddy:

api.snlx.net {
    reverse_proxy localhost:4242
}

It's done

Honestly, I'm pleasantly surprised by caddy. I've tested the server on a VM and it worked there, but after having issues with NGINX the last time I tried to set up the server, deploying this onto the real machine and seeing it work the first time was very nice.

The system is currently (2026-01-10) running in diskless mode, so the entire setup process looked like this:

Sidenote: I've been battling the asciinema standalone player for the past 2 hours because my base styles refused to work with it and then because I wanted to make it fit in.

Clarification: I'm using docker in the video to create a test machine, the actual server is a VPS with no container engine.

What's next?

This project is done, now I need to update mk-bridge to support secret notes and status updates, then make the frontend able to read both.