A simple web API with Deno, Oak, NGINX secured with Let's Encrypt on Google Cloud

I’m writing this primarily for my own reference — so I don’t forget how to do this for next time, but if you find it useful then that’s cool too. Here’s what we’ll do. We’re gonna set up an API that when you access it, it sends back the following JSON message:

{ "message": "Hello World!" }

Simple right? OK!

Note: I’ll be running all this on my Google Cloud Compute instance. You can learn how to set one up for free using this handy tutorial that I wrote last time. But we’ll get to that part later.

First up let’s do an MVP. We’ll be running our web server on Deno so make sure it’s installed — or you can use Node.js/Express if you’re familiar with that. Basically we just want a http server listening on a TCP port.

Make a server.ts in a new project folder and chuck in the following:

import { Application } from "https://deno.land/x/oak/mod.ts";

const app = new Application();

app.use((ctx) => {
  ctx.response.body = { message: "Hello World!" };
});

console.log("Listening on http://localhost:12345");
await app.listen({ port: 12345 });

And then run deno run --allow-net server.ts and we’ll be listening on http://localhost:12345

…to be continued (check back later and maybe I’ll have written more)