One of the vital requirements of a development-friendly platform is its ability to support local/desktop-based testing. The APIC platform meets this critical requirement by providing a local runtime execution environment called LTE for you to publish and test your APIs. This platform is based upon the Docker container framework. It is worth mentioning that the API Manager web-based tool uses DataPower Gateway for API execution.
There are multiple components of this containerized LTE platform. These components are an API management service, two DataPower gateways (API and v5 compatible), an authentication gateway, a local user registry, and a Postgres database. APIC does an excellent job of hiding the many components’ installation complexity and provides a more straightforward installation path via a container deployment model. We will cover this installation in this section.
Prerequisites
Before performing the installation of LTE on your local workstation, ensure that the following prerequisites are taken care of for a successful installation of LTE:
- Install the toolkit and Designer components as covered in the previous sections.
- Create a directory. Place the following files in that directory:
apic-lte-images_10.0.1.5.tar.gz: Container images for various LTE components.
apic-lte-win_10.0.1.5.exe: This is the LTE binary. This is required to execute the LTE commands. It is advisable to have this file’s directory in your PATH variable.
3. Ensure that the Designer and the LTE components are from the same APIC fix pack release for them to work together. For your setup, you use toolkit-loopback-designer-windows_10.0.1.5.zip, apic-lte-images_10.0.1.5.tar.gz, and apic-lte-win_10.0.1.5.exe (also mentioned in the Technical requirements section of this chapter). As is apparent from these filenames, they are from the same APIC fix pack release.
Installation
Having ensured that the prerequisites are in place, go ahead and execute the following commands. These can be executed on the Windows command shell, Windows PowerShell, or a Linux terminal (if you are performing this setup on Linux):
- Test that Docker is correctly installed on your machine. Execute the following command:
docker version
2. Start Docker by executing this command:
docker run -d -p 80:80 docker/getting-started
3. Load LTE container images to your Docker repository. You will need to specify the path to the apic-lte-images_10.0.1.5.tar.gz file in this command:
docker load -i <images-tar-directory>\apic-lte-
images_10.0.1.5.tar.gz
Note
Ensure that previous command successfully loads images apiconnect/ibm-apiconnect-management-apim, apiconnect/ibm-apiconnect-management-lur, apiconnect/ibm-apiconnect-gateway-datapower-nonprod, apiconnect/ibm-apiconnect-management-juhu, postgres, and busybox.
These images are required for the LTE environment to function. If there are any errors in the loading of the container images, then you will need to resolve the errors before performing the rest of the steps.
4. Verify that the images are loaded in the Docker repository by executing this command:
docker image ls
Figure 4.1 – The Docker image ls command results
5. Make sure that the apic-lte-win_10.0.1.5.exe directory is in your environment’s PATH.
6. Ensure that all LTE container components are installed (as shown in Figure 4.2) by executing this command:
apic-lte-win_10.0.1.5.exe status
This will get the following output:
Figure 4.2 – LTE components
7. Start Docker containers for APIC by executing this command:
apic-lte-win_10.0.1.5.exe start
Note
There are a number of switches that are applicable to the start command. Some of the main switches are discussed next:
–keep-config: By default, apic-lte-win_10.0.1.5 start, without the –keep-config switch, deletes all the previously published API/Product information from the configuration DB and re-initializes the LTE configuration. Essentially, LTE starts with an empty backend DB that does not contain the APIs and Products that may have been published during an earlier run of LTE. To retain the previously published configuration, use the –keep-config switch. When using –keep-config, any other switches (for example, –datapower-api-gateway-enabled –datapower-gateway-enabled) specified for the start are ignored, and instead the same flags that were used during the earlier start are used. The start switch starts the DataPower API Gateway by default.
8. After the successful start of the LTE environment, you should see a response similar to Figure 4.3 in your console:
Figure 4.3 – LTE environment start results
You will be using a number of the values that are displayed in Figure 4.3. Copy these values to a notepad. They will be used later. There are two important values not displayed here. These are DataPower web admin URLs for DataPower API Gateway and DataPower Gateway (v5 compatible). Sometimes, during your API testing and debugging, you might have to refer to the gateway logs. In such cases, having access to these URLs will be beneficial. These URLs are as follows:
- https://localhost:9090/ (v5 compatible)
- https://localhost:9091/ (API Gateway)
You can log in using admin/admin credentials on both these URLs.
LTE verification will be discussed next.