farside - Farside fork

Age	Commit message (Collapse)	Author
2021-11-24	Use quantum core for update scheduling	Ben Busby
	Rather than requiring a traditional crontab install, the app now leverages quantum-core (link below) to schedule the instance update/sync task every 5 minutes. Some updates as a result: - The new job is scheduled at runtime in server.ex. - The update.exs script was refactored to be compiled along with the rest of the app as instances.ex. - Scheduler and Server modules were added for creating and executing the new update task - All shell scripts were removed, as they are no longer needed https://github.com/quantum-elixir/quantum-core
2021-11-15	Install crontab w/ script	Ben Busby
	This adds a couple of new scripts: install-crontab.sh and update.sh. The install-crontab script does exactly that -- it installs a new crontab that runs the update script every 5 minutes. An update script was added to simplify the crontab a bit and to ensure the Elixir update script is executed from the correct directory.
2021-11-10	Prevent same instance from being selected twice in a row	Ben Busby
	Introduces a new db key "<service>-previous" to track which instance was last selected for a particular service. This allows for filtering the list of available instances to exclude the instance that was last picked, to ensure a (slightly) more even distribution of traffic. There's still the possiblity of the following scenario, however: :service instances > 2 /:service request #1 -> instance #1 /:service request #2 -> instance #2 /:service request #3 -> instance #1 /:service request #4 -> instance #2 where there are many ignored instances for a particular service. One possible solution would be to implement the "<service>-previous" value to be a list, rather than a single value, and push to that list until only one element is left in the original "instance" array after filtering, and then delete the "<service>-previous" key.
2021-11-10	Move Service struct def to its own module	Ben Busby
	Service struct now defined in lib/service.ex This makes a bit more sense now that its a shared resource, rather than just defining it only in the update.exs script.
2021-11-09	Skip querying all instances w/ "test mode"	Ben Busby
	Now allows setting FARSIDE_TEST to skip individually fetching each instance, and instead just adds all of them to redis instantly. This allows for an easier time in CI builds, for both the sake of speed and to prevent a scenario where many simultaneous builds have a noticeable impact on actual instances.
2021-11-08	Display list of available instances on home page	Ben Busby
	This introduces a number of new changes: - Services are now inserted into redis with a prefix prepended to the key name. This allows for easier filtering to get only live instances. - The home page now uses an eex template for displaying all live instances for every service, determined by the last update - A "last_updated" field was added - farside.ex was added to contain all functionality related to querying for instances (WIP) - Other improvements
2021-11-07	Refactor project to new name	Ben Busby
	The name of the project is being refactored from Privacy Revolver to Farside. The reasoning behind this is: 1. A shorter name is easier to remember 2. It can stand for "FOSS alternative redirecting service" (which I know doesn't encapsulate all letters from "farside", but it's close enough). This commit also includes improvements to the update script for determining how far along the script is.
2021-10-22	Move constants to config, update string formatting	Ben Busby
	Not sure if this is the Elixir-y way to do this, but seems more logical than hardcoding values such as redis connection. Also went through and improved how string formatting was performed throughout the app. Rather than "combining" <> "strings" this way, I'm now just doing "#${variable}#{formatting}", which looks a lot cleaner.
2021-10-22	Write results of update script to file for debugging	Ben Busby
	The update script now writes the available instances to a .update-results* file (where previous runs have "-prev" appended to the file name). This helps to see how instance availability changes between runs of the script when debugging overall functionality of the app.
2021-10-22	Output available instances and fallback URL to redis	Ben Busby
	Once a list of available URLs has been determined for a particular service, the list is written as "service -> [list of instances]" to a local redis connection. These can then be used in the greater routing logic to pick a random instance from the list, or use a fallback instance if none are determined to be available.
2021-10-21	Validate status code for all service instances	Ben Busby
	Updated to filter out all instances that either time out (I believe default timeout for HTTPoison is 5s) or return a non-200 status code.
2021-10-21	Initialize update script	Ben Busby
	My initial thought for this: create a simple redis db for storing key value pairs of instance -> list of live instances for each privacy front end (libreddit, bibliogram, etc). A script executed on a certain schedule would (in the background) check each instance to make sure it isn't down or unreasonably slow. If the instance is available, add it to a list of available instances in the db. When a user navigates to the revolver url (something like <url>/<service>/<...>), the app would pick a random value from the list returned by redis.get('<service>') and forward the user to that instance. As a side note, this could instead load the instances json from a remote source (like github or something) so that changes to instances don't need to involve a redeploy of the entire app.