This is the personal website of me, Sam Schlesinger. The following will describe the structural design, the choice of servant as the framework, how to spin it up locally, and how it is deployed using AWS.
I am using Haskell and the stack build tool. The reason I chose to do things this way is mainly to do with my own skill set. I know Haskell better than any other programming language and I use stack as my build tool for personal projects as well as in my work. The project is organized as of now into two packages, one for the API and another for the server itself. The reasons I do this are to reduce build times when I am modifying a single project, to allow for eventually switching over to a Haskell based front end system, and to allow me to think of these as the separate units that they really are in my opinion. I have a shared-package.yaml file which minimizes the amount I have to write in each package.yaml, which stack uses for package configuration.
I really, really like the servant framework for building and serving HTTP APIs. The ability to describe your API and then be forced to implement a conforming server is exactly the type of thing that I believe Haskell is useful for, with its powerful type level programming abilities. I chose it because of my experience personally and professionally with it, and my belief that it is a very good choice to build HTTP servers, from simple to complex. It will also allow me to document the API quite easily.
To run this locally, you simply run stack run PORT in a terminal while your
current directory is wherever you cloned the repository.
I will write this once I have deployed it. I have deployed websites before to AWS, but I do not know if I will do this in the same way as I have done in the past, as I want to use this as an opportunity to learn as much as possible in a very simple context.