From its very inception, Swift was intended to be a general-purpose programming language, applicable for multiple use cases and on multiple platforms, not just for building apps for Apple platforms. One of the obvious use cases, other than building apps, is for creating server-side code. After all, interacting with a server is a vital component of almost any app. The vast majority of servers that power the internet run on Linux, which is arguably more suited to the task than any Apple platform. Therefore, being able to run Swift on Linux is vital to the goal of making Swift a viable server-side programming language option.
In this chapter, we will investigate installing the Swift toolchain on Linux, using a web server framework to build a REST API, and hosting our API via a hosting service.
All the code for this chapter can be found in a GitHub repository at http...