Receive JSON POST Data
Purpose
Request came across my desk for a web server to receive JSON POST data, providing web hooks for another system to parse. On my end things were simple enough.
- Simple Apache server to receive requests.
- Basic Authentication
- Save the POST data to file (For now, but I feel this will be expanded in the near future)
Process
Apache Config
Very simple and clean vhost.
<VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ <Directory /var/www/html/> AuthType Basic AuthName "Restricted" AuthBasicProvider file AuthUserFile "/etc/httpd/password" Require valid-user </Directory> </VirtualHost>
Quick and dirty password file
htpasswd -bc /etc/httpd/password test test
PHP Script
[1][2]This example will echo the posted data back to the client during testing, as well as save the file to disk.
<?php
$myFile = "testFile.txt";
$data = file_get_contents('php://input');
echo $data;
file_put_contents($myFile,$data);
?>
To further build on this, and to keep track of the received hooks, I wanted to add a date/time stamp to the file[3].
<?php
$today = date("mdY_His");
$myFile = "testFile_$today.txt";
$data = file_get_contents('php://input');
file_put_contents($myFile,$data);
?>
Testing
Used the following POST method with curl to test with.
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"test":"1"}' http://localhost
Again, but with a username/password
curl --user test:test -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"test":"1"}' http://localhost
