e-Referrals-Service

This is a RESTful HL7® FHIR® API specification for the e-Referral-Service Professional API.

• specification/ This Open API Specification describes the endpoints, methods and messages exchanged by the API. Use it to generate interactive documentation; the contract between the API and its consumers.
• sandbox/ This NodeJS application implements a mock implementation of the service. Use it as a back-end service to the interactive documentation to illustrate interactions and concepts. It is not intended to provide an exhaustive/faithful environment suitable for full development and testing.
• scripts/ Utilities helpful to developers of this specification.
• proxies/ Live (connecting to another service) and sandbox (using the sandbox container) Apigee API Proxy definitions.

Consumers of the API will find developer documentation on the NHS Digital Developer Hub.

Contributing

Contributions to this project are welcome from anyone, providing that they conform to the guidelines for contribution and the community code of conduct.

New branches and pull requests should always be created from the develop branch.

All Pull Requests must be approved and merged only by one of the members of the e-RS team.

Merging to the master branch is part of our release process and should only ever be done by one of the members of the e-RS team.

Licensing

This code is dual licensed under the MIT license and the OGL (Open Government License). Any new work added to this repository must conform to the conditions of these licenses. In particular this means that this project may not depend on GPL-licensed or AGPL-licensed libraries, as these would violate the terms of those libraries' licenses.

The contents of this repository are protected by Crown Copyright (C).

Development

Requirements

• make
• nodejs + npm/yarn
• poetry

Environment setup

Currently, automation for setting up the right environment is only available for machines based on RedHatEnterpriseLinux (RHEL). Running the following will ensure your environment is ready for development. It will install pyenv, Python 3.10.8 and its dependencies (yum), create a virtual environment (named apigee), and ensure poetry is installed under it.

$ make setup-environment

Activating apigee is now done by the file .python-version, so cd'ing into the repository directory will suffice to use the virtual environment.

If you wish to remove all changes made by setup-environment, you can run the following:

$ make clean-environment

This will erase your ~/.pyenv directory, where pyenv stores the different Python versions, and will revert ~/.bashrc and ~./bash_profile. You may want to logout/login for changes to take effect.

Install

After setting up and activating the right environment, running make install will set up additional configuration pertaining to node, poetry and githooks.

$ make install

Updating hooks

You can install/update some pre-commit hooks to ensure you can't commit invalid spec changes by accident. These are also run in CI, but it's useful to run them locally too.

$ make install-hooks

Environment Variables

Various scripts and commands rely on environment variables being set. These are documented with the commands.

💡 Consider using direnv to manage your environment variables during development and maintaining your own .envrc file - the values of these variables will be specific to you and/or sensitive.

Make commands

There are make commands that alias some of this functionality:

• lint -- Lints the spec and code
• publish -- Outputs the specification as a single file into the build/ directory
• serve -- Serves a preview of the specification in human-readable format

Testing

Each API and team is unique. We encourage you to use a test/ folder in the root of the project, and use whatever testing frameworks or apps your team feels comfortable with. It is important that the URL your test points to be configurable. We have included some stubs in the Makefile for running tests.

VS Code Plugins

• openapi-lint resolves links and validates entire spec with the 'OpenAPI Resolve and Validate' command
• OpenAPI (Swagger) Editor provides sidebar navigation

Emacs Plugins

• openapi-yaml-mode provides syntax highlighting, completion, and path help

Redocly CLI

Redocly CLI Bring versatile OpenAPI validation, linting & bundling to your command line (and VS Code!) with this open-source Swiss knife.

Redocly CLI does the lifting for the following npm scripts:

• test -- Lints the definition
• publish -- Outputs the specification as a single file into the build/ directory
• serve -- Serves a preview of the specification in human-readable format

(Workflow detailed in a post on the developerjack blog.)

💡 The publish command is useful when uploading to Apigee which requires the spec as a single file.

Caveats

Swagger UI

Swagger UI unfortunately doesn't correctly render $refs in examples, so use speccy serve instead.

Apigee Portal

The Apigee portal will not automatically pull examples from schemas, you must specify them manually.

Deployment

Specification

Update the API Specification and derived documentation in the Portal.

make deploy-spec with environment variables:

• APIGEE_USERNAME
• APIGEE_PASSWORD
• APIGEE_SPEC_ID
• APIGEE_PORTAL_API_ID

API Proxy & Sandbox Service

Redeploy the API Proxy and hosted Sandbox service.

make deploy-proxy with environment variables:

• APIGEE_USERNAME
• APIGEE_PASSWORD
• APIGEE_ORGANIZATION
• APIGEE_ENVIRONMENTS - Comma-separated list of environments to deploy to (e.g. test,prod)
• APIGEE_APIPROXY - Name of the API Proxy for deployment
• APIGEE_BASE_PATH - The proxy's base path (must be unique)

💡 Specify your own API Proxy (with base path) for use during development.

Platform setup

Successful deployment of the API Proxy requires:

1. A Target Server named e-referrals-service-api-target
2. A Key-Value Map named ers-variables, containing any values you might need at proxy runtime
3. A Key-Value Map named ers-variables-encrypted, containing any secrets you might need at proxy runtime

💡 For Sandbox-running environments (test) these need to be present for successful deployment but can be set to empty/dummy values.