How to connect PassPill to your server
The PassPill Project has been launched! One of the nicest things about sharing the complete development of a webapp is that we don’t need a feature to work in order to publish it, and that what’s happening to the PassPill backend.
At the moment of writing these lines the app’s front-end is available, but the back-end is not online, so you need to run it in your machine in order to test it.
These instructions will be valid also for those who wants to store the passwords themselves in their computers or maybe in a server for a whole company.
Installing the back-end
Right now the back-end is a Node.js server that offers an API using express.js. In the future we want to offer more possibilities, like installing it in AWS or Google cloud, have a look at the PassPill architecture to know more.
To get the server code download it from the Github repo, or clone it from the terminal with the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/passpill-io/passpill-backend.git
cd passpill-backend
npm install
npm startYou will need to wait between each command above, but if everything went fine you will see the server running:
The server will be available at http:/localhost:3333. If you want it to run in a different port you can update it in server.js or using the environment variable PORT. This will run the server in the port 4444:
PORT=4444 npm start Connecting the front-end
PassPill wants to make it really easy for anyone that want to contribute to the code, so you can connect the latest app that is running at app.passpill.io to your local server or whatever other server you may be running. This way, if you are a back-end developer, you don’t need to install the front-end to play with the Node.js code.
The same will happen for front-end developers, you will be able to connect your local front-end to the public backend at passpill.io when it gets published.
You need to access to the app’s settings to make it point to your server, to do so click on the cog at the top right:
And then you will see a settings screen that only contains the server URL at the moment. Set it to your server API’s URL and click on Save :
That’s all, you can start playing with the app. At this moment not much is working, but you can already store your passwords so why don’t give it a try?
When is the back-end going to be available?
No idea, we have no date for publishing the back-end because the API is not stable and the way the pills are stored either. We don’t want people to start saving pills and make a big change that need some kind of migration, especially because we don’t have access to the data and can’t update its format easily. But I hope we’ll have it soon.
What we already have is a brand new page to know what’s the development status of the PassPill Project! You can see there what’s going on with the development and where we are going to, I hope this improve the clarity of the PassPill Project for those who wants to jump in.
