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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. I have a couple servers I could maybe run something on. I guess I don’t really know how to serve a link where I could make an HTTP request. I run servers with discourse and other applications but I never manually serve something.

I suppose this is simple enough and I should look that up. What is it called on the server side when you make a URL available for receiving HTTP requests? I realize I’m not sure what to research exactly.

EDIT: wait a minute, actually I’ve used flask before with python. I guess I just need to figure out how to run flask on my web server, maybe on a sub domain, without interfering with the discourse instance that’s already there. Hmmm.

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> What is it called on the server side when you make a URL available for receiving HTTP requests?

This fits the definition of API (application programming interface).

For a single API endpoint to post data, I would personally write a little Node.js script using built-in HTTP module or Express. For Python, maybe something like this: https://pythonbasics.org/flask-rest-api/

Knowledge of plain old CGI on a web server seems lost due to fancy frameworks? And even without the CGI-Interface, you can make it work if you have a script monitoring your web server's logs:

I sometimes transfer data with curl via a url which does not exist, but where a script running on the server watches the server's error log and extracts data from those entries. For example: access (via curl or perl' GET, or whatever) these urls

http://my-server/data0815/up+2 http://my-server/data0815/down-3

The script watches for these entries and acts upon the stuff following the data0815 part. It's a fast hack, which can be augmented and expanded in various ways, all without frameworks.

> Knowledge of plain old CGI on a web server seems lost due to fancy frameworks?

eh I just never learned it. I'm a robotics engineer and I tend to write programs in Python (or less commonly now, C++) to run in a loop and deal with local hardware. The way that web servers operate in a stateless multithreaded way involves some peculiarities that I always find a little tricky.

> I sometimes transfer data with curl via a url which does not exist, but where a script running on the server watches the server's error log and extracts data from those entries.

Hey that's a nice trick! I already have a server running discourse. Maybe I can sneak something in there. Though it looks like someone's suggestion of https://healthchecks.io/ might do what I need.

Yep, a simple flask app is an option. Easy to deploy and have a simple endpoint hook that reads the input parameters and then does your magic of writing out some static files and/or if you feel adventurous write out json files that can be read via javascript!

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