SARK V6 API

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sark6api

sark6api is fairly vanilla OAS api so it should be familiar to anyone who uses modern api's in their work. It allows you to programmatically do (almost) anything you can do at the SARK V6 browser. Why would you want to do that? Well maybe you have an idea for an extension to SARK, maybe you want to rewrite all or parts of the SARK browser and incorporate it into a package of your own. Maybe you want to control a remote SARK from a management layer. All of these things are possible with the API.

sark6api can be installed onto buster (Debian 10) or bionic (Ubuntu 18). Only 64 bit architectures are supported for both X86 and ARM.

It was tested with Postman 7.2 and developed on Vagrant Homestead running Ubuntu 18.04. sark6api uses the Laravel 7 API framework.

Requirements

• PHP 7.2.5 or higher
• PHP Composer
• Laravel 7
• GiT
• SARK V6.0.1-50 or higher

Before you begin

If you haven't used Postman before then it would be a good idea to familiarise yourself with it before you begin. Postman is a general purpose API testing tool which is easy to use (at least for what we want to do). It runs as an app on OSX or Windows and there is also a version for Ubuntu desktop. It makes testing and exploring API's a breeze. In my view it's essential for this kind of work.

WARNING

The initial release of sark6api works as a "trusted" peer. It has no security of its own so you must use fixed IP's and secure firewall rules to keep it safe from baddies. So, for now, no dynamic IP clients. We are working on an OAuth security blanket and it will be ready as soon as we can get it out the door but you can test with it as-is as long as you observe point-to-point security using the host SARK firewall rules.

The srk6api runs at port 44300 (HTTPS).

Installation

You will need a SARKV6 host running on buster or bionic. Doesn't matter what the underlying platform is.

Update your existing deb packages

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

NB - this will bring your SARK up to the latest V6 release.

• GiT - it should already be installed as part of the sark6 install. If not then you can do

sudo apt install git

There are a few PHP extensions you may need over and above what gets dragged along with SARK. However, my Vagrant Homestead dev box doesn't appear to have any of them and chugs along OK so YMMV.

• BCMath PHP Extension (php-bcmath)
• Ctype PHP Extension (php-ctype)
• Fileinfo PHP extension (php-fileinfo)
• Tokenizer PHP Extension (php-tokenizer)

I'm not sure about the last one because my Vagrant Homestead dev box doesn't appear to have it and it chugs along OK so YMMV.

You will also need a regular user account on the box. It doesn't much matter what you choose, it's just an anchor to install the code.

Next, you can install composer. Composer is the PHP package manager. You can think of it a bit like the Debian package manager but with a lot of stuff in it just for PHP. It has more or less become the tool of choice for GiT PHP developers to package their code and we need it to enable the Laravel API framework.

apt install composer

adduser s6api