Playing around with Lumen 5.3 and MongoDB to build an API to search for POIs (Points Of Interest) nearest to a given UK postcode.
We'll use the Open Charge Map as the map data and MongoDB built-in geo-location search to find the nearest points to a given UK postcode. And we'll leverage Postcodes.io to geo-locate the searched postcodes.
We'll explain how to set it all up on DigitalOcean so you can reuse this project to build an API with your own data source.
Providing you have MongoDB installed and running, in your .env file, set the
server details and credentials:
DB_CONNECTION=mongodb
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=27017
DB_DATABASE=pois
DB_USERNAME=
DB_PASSWORD=
Then just run:
php artisan migrate --seed
This command will run a migration that creates the demo collection and sets the index required for the geo-location search while the dataseeder will load the demo data in the collection.
We'll assume you already have PHP and composer installed.
After cloning this repo, and before running composer install, you'll need to
install the MongoDB extension for PHP which can be done like so on MacOS
(for PHP 7.0):
brew install php70-mongodb