API

Introduction> Introduction # Most Ruby on Rails applications require user registration and authentication mechanisms. Developing these from scratch requires a lot of time and effort – thankfully, there’s Devise. Using the Devise gem, you can set up a full-fledged user authentication system within minutes.

Introduction> Introduction # An API, or Application Program Interface, enables developers to integrate one app with another. They expose some of a program’s inner workings in a limited way. You can use APIs to get information from other programs or to automate things you normally do in your web browser.

Introduction> Introduction # The cloud-init program that is available on recent distributions (only Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 7 at the time of this writing) is able to consume and execute data from the user-data field of the DigitalOcean metadata service.

Introduction> Introduction # Terraform is a tool for building and managing infrastructure in an organized way. You can use it to manage DigitalOcean Droplets, Load Balancers, and even DNS entries, in addition to a large variety of services offered by other providers.

Introduction> Introduction # With the introduction of the DigitalOcean metadata service, it is possible to start configuring your servers before you even log in. In short, the metadata service is an HTTP location that your server can access during the boot process.

An earlier version of this tutorial was written by Brennen Bearnes. Introduction> Introduction # DigitalOcean’s web-based control panel provides a point-and-click interface for managing Droplets. However, you may prefer a command-line tool if you have many Droplets to manage, need to administer Droplets from the terminal without a graphical desktop available, or have tasks which would benefit from a scriptable interface.

Introduction> Introduction # OAuth 2 is an authorization framework that enables applications — such as Facebook, GitHub, and DigitalOcean — to obtain limited access to user accounts on an HTTP service.