Serving a pkpass directly from backend

[Saim-Khan1]

Hey @alexandercerutti,

It's Saim again, hope you're doing well! In your comment on scriptpapi's YouTube video, I saw you mentioned that passes do not need to be saved to cloud storage or anything and can just be served as is. Would you be able to walk me through roughly how that works? I tried to look through the examples in this repo but I couldn't quite make sense of where I should look, I am an iOS developer primarily so would love a bit of help with this side of things :)

Assuming I have the exact same backend featured in that video, if you could please point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it!

Best wishes,
Saim

[alexandercerutti]

Hey there, @Saim-Khan1!
Sadly I cannot give you complete guidance because it might differ depending on many variables in play.

You can look at it this way: you are performing an HTTP Request and replying back with one or more chunks of data. Some of those chunks might be the file itself you are serving from the server. Response must have a Content-Type, a name, and whatever. Along with text data that describe the HTTP Response, you have some binary information. That binary information is the pass you are serving back.

You could grab that binary information, and set it to have a specific Content-Type, hence use it like such information type.

I could link you to an example swift app I did like 4 years ago, which takes an URL in and receives and adds the PKPass without the need of saving it first somewhere in the cloud.

Of course, the app is not updated. There might be better ways to achieve things, but it might be good enough to let you see how it might go. Do not expect high-quality / enterprise-level code. I did only a bunch of months with Swift like 4 years ago.

Here's the link: https://github.com/alexandercerutti/passkit-sample-client
And this is the code I think it might be useful to you: https://github.com/alexandercerutti/passkit-sample-client/blob/3c24467c01a2273d4c66d9a955b71141d1266161/Passkit-sample-client/ViewController.swift#L244-L272

Let me know!

[Saim-Khan1]

Sounds good, thanks a lot! I'll take a look. In terms of the code for the backend, I've temporarily made my backend repo public: https://github.com/syncstormco/PassKit-Backend
At the end of index.js is where I am currently uploading the .pkpass to firebase cloud storage, I was just wondering how this should be changed to send the pkpass itself as the response? If you wouldn't mind sharing the code snippet for this that would be amazing, thanks a lot :)

[alexandercerutti]

I don't have a code for that, but I guess you can use response parameter to set the Content-Type header (note that passkit-generator offers a .mimeType property to be used, so you won't use the wrong one), set the status code and use .send() and pass to it the getAsBuffer result.

Somehow like you can see it here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/http-events?hl=en&gen=2nd#terminate_http_functions

[Saim-Khan1]

Got it, I'll give that a go and let you know. Thanks a lot for your help!

[Saim-Khan1]

Yep that worked perfectly! Thanks a lot for your help :)

[alexandercerutti]

Great to know! Thanks for your feedback! ;)

[alexandercerutti]

Now I've also fixed Serverless examples to directly return the PKPass instead of uploading on S3.

May I ask you if would you like to contribute to examples by creating a Firebase example? :)