This is service for Small Victories that continually polls a user's Dropbox for changes. If changes are detected, it renders the assets in the folder into a HTML webpage and places the page in a cache for the frontend to retrieve and display.
In order to limit load on Dropbox, the folder revision is saved after each update, and updates are then only made if the folder revision has changed.
The service is designed to run continually on Heroku on a single "dyno", sleeping between API calls to limit load on Dropbox.
Currently, it processes about 1000 users every 10 seconds, assuming many of the users revisions have not changed. If the userbase were to grow far beyond that further load limiting functionality would likely be introduced.
Considerations for the design were as follows:
- Keep cost of running continually at free, or close to free, if possible
- Speed of updates after a user makes changes
- Limiting abuse of Dropbox's API
This service is written entirely in Go, so you'll need to download and install that.
You'll also need Foreman to start the application with the proper environment variables.
To configure the service, you can use the configuration example and create
a .env file containing your credentials.
To run, you then use foreman:
$ go build
$ foreman run ./sv-fetcher
...
To run the tests:
$ go test
...
To deploy:
$ heroku create -b https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-go.git
...
$ git push heroku master
...
You'll need:
- Heroku account
- Heroku Postgres database
- Redis add-on of some kind
- Librato Metrics account
Use heroku config:add to add environment variables based on your
various tokens from the above to create the production environment,
as it is described in .env.example.
Keep in mind these credentials should be shared with the sv-frontend, so you'll need to add the same environment variables there.
Small Victories being open source is mostly educational, as there is unknown intent for further development.
If you're interested in maintaining or contributing to the project and website, please contact us and we'll chat about it. Thanks!
See license file.