Create News Service

In this section, we create our first news service app. The news service app is based of Flask API and calls the NewsAPI to generate top-news by country. The news service app will be configured on port:3003

Sample request/response

A request involves 2 attributes:

• country : This is the 2 letter code for the country
• API key : This can be generated from the website. I am using the original author's

A sample request/response will look like this :

• Sample request for all news for the day in US

https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?country=US&apiKey=70dcd1c6a0d24ebdb57ff071ff9b8ddc

• Sample response for this request (JSON)

StatusCode        : 200
StatusDescription : OK
Content           : {
                      "articles": [
                        {
                          "author": "Amy Gardner, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff", 
                          "content": "Comment on this story\r\nThe arrest of a defeated candidate for the New Mexico legislature on charges tha...
RawContent        : HTTP/1.1 200 OK
                    Connection: keep-alive
                    Content-Length: 18926
                    Content-Type: application/json
                    Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2023 03:16:42 GMT
                    Server: nginx/1.23.3

                    {
                      "articles": [
                        {
                          "author": "Am...

Create news service

Create the file news.py and copy the following contents

from flask import Flask, request
from flask_restful import Api
import json
import requests

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)
@app.route('/news')
def news():
    # sample request: https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?country=US&apiKey=70dcd1c6a0d24ebdb57ff071ff9b8ddc
    country_name = request.args.get('country')
    api_key = "70dcd1c6a0d24ebdb57ff071ff9b8ddc"
    base_url = "http://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?"
    complete_url = base_url + "country=" + country_name + "&apiKey=" + api_key
    response = requests.get(complete_url)
    return response.json()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(host="0.0.0.0",port='3003',threaded=True,debug=True)

Create Dockerfile

We will create a new dockerfile called Dockerfile.news. This will be referenced in the docker-compose.yml file. Copy the following contents into Dockerfile.news.

# use Python 3.11 image
FROM python:3.11-alpine

# install dependencies:
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
EXPOSE 3003
COPY news.py .

# run the application:
CMD ["python", "news.py"]

This will tell docker to:

• Use python base image 3.11-alpine
• Reference requirements.txt in the image to install required software
• Expose port 3003
• Copy news.py to the image
• Start the news service