LightningTalks

A system for accepting votes for lightning talks.

Table of Contents

• Bootstrapping
  • Development
  • Production
    • Installs
    • Varnish
    • Nginx
    • Daemons
• Software
  • Overview
  • Assumptions
  • Models
  • Routes
• Tests

Bootstrapping

Here's how to get the thing running, either on your own local computer for development or on a server for a production deployment.

Development

Step Zero

You should have some Python development bits pre-installed. I love this guide from NPR Visuals. How to Setup Your Mac to Develop News Applications Like We Do

Step One

Install a local version of MongoDB to hold the data.

brew install mongodb
ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/mongodb/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist

Step Two

Pull down the code from Git, create a virtual environment and install requirements.

git clone git@github.com:ireapps/lightning-talks.git && cd lightning-talks
mkvirtualenv lightningtalks
pip install -r requirements.txt

Step Three

Load some fake data.

fab fake_data

Step Four

Run the app.

python app.py

Production

Installs

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-27 python-27-dev mongodb nginx libffi-dev libssl-dev lib32ncurses5 lib32ncurses5-dev varnish apache2-utils
sudo service nginx stop
sudo service varnish stop
sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Varnish

In production, the site is served by Varnish. We exclude the /api/ routes so that the responses are dynamic. We wouldn't want to cache which sessions a single user had voted for, for example, because we'd be sending out of date information to the client. Still, caching just the homepage route means that we serve the most popular (and largest) page from Varnish rather than from an application server.

• /etc/default/varnish sets the startup defaults for the Varnish daemon. Notice we're only allocating 8mb of cache -- that's because we're only caching the homepage route.

START=yes
NFILES=131072
MEMLOCK=82000
DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
             -T localhost:81 \
             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
             -S /etc/varnish/secret \
             -s malloc,8m"

• /etc/varnish/default.vcl sets the rules for caching responses. We ignore any route that starts with /api/ because these must be dynamic.

backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8001";
}
sub vcl_recv {
    if (req.url ~ "^/api/(.*)") { return(pass); }
    set req.url = regsuball(req.url,"[?&]_=[^&]{1,25}","");
    set req.backend = default;
    set req.grace = 10h;
    return(lookup);
}
sub vcl_miss {
    return(fetch);
}
sub vcl_hit {
    return(deliver);
}
sub vcl_fetch {
    set beresp.ttl = 10h;
    set beresp.grace = 10h;
    set beresp.http.X-Cacheable = "YES";
    unset beresp.http.Vary;
    return(deliver);
}
sub vcl_deliver {
    set resp.http.X-NICAR-SLOGAN = "I code like a journalist.";
    if (obj.hits > 0) {
        set resp.http.X-Cache = "HIT";
        set resp.http.X-Cache-Hits = obj.hits;
        set resp.http.X-Cache-Backend = req.backend;
    } else {
        set resp.http.X-Cache = "MISS";
    }
    return(deliver);
}

Nginx

In production, Varnish passes its requests to Nginx for processing. For the homepage route, the index.html file is served from a folder inside the app. On deploy, we bake a copy of the file and push it up to our Git repository and then pull it down to the server.

• /etc/nginx/nginx.conf controls our Nginx server. It listens on port 8001 and passes to uWSGI, our Python application server, for any URL that starts with /api/. Special treatment is given to the /api/dashboard/ URL -- it's protected with HTTP BasicAuth -- and with the default / route, which sends straight to flat files in our app folder.

worker_processes  2;
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log crit;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
    worker_connections 2048;
    multi_accept on;
}

http {
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    server_names_hash_bucket_size 128;
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;
    access_log off;
    gzip on;
    gzip_disable "msie6";
    server {
        #listen 80;
        #location ^~ /api/dashboard/ { auth_basic "Restricted"; auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd; uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8000; include uwsgi_params;  }
        #location / { uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8000; include uwsgi_params; }

        listen 8001;
        location ^~ /api/dashboard/ { auth_basic "Restricted"; auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd; uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8000; include uwsgi_params;  }
        location ^~ /api/ { uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8000; include uwsgi_params; }
        location / { root /home/ubuntu/lightning-talks/www/; }
    }
}

Daemons

confs/uwsgi.conf is symlinked in /etc/init/ on the production server.

• confs/uwsgi.conf runs as a daemon. This daemon runs the dynamic /api/ routes that handle user registration and login, session creation, and vote creation and deletion.

Software

Overview

Lightning talks is a Flask application that uses PyMongo to read from and write to a MongoDB server.

Assumptions

Lightning talks sends all of its data via HTTP GET requests and URL parameters. We do this because we cannot be certain that the app may not need to send messages across domains, and cross-domain POST is still fraught with difficulty.

Models

We've broken down the lightning talks data model into three model classes.

User

Represents a single user. Users can create a Session and can also vote for a Session. See models.py for more info.

Session

Represents a single session. See models.py for more info. A User can create a session.

Vote

Represents a single User's vote on a single Session. A User can both create a vote and delete a vote. See models.py for more info.

Routes

The core logic of the site is handled via a series of Flask routes that recieve URL parameters and return JSON. There are several AJAX requests in site.js where you can see this in action.

Route /api/user/action/

This route handles two behaviors.

• Register a new user: If email, password and name are sent as URL parameters, the route will attempt to register this user. If an existing user has this email address, the user will be logged in. If there is no existing user with this email address, the user will be registered and a message will be sent returning the new user's _id, a success flag and an action key with the value register.

{
    "_id": "97984267-ab75-46c4-b113-016a5555e92b",
    "success": true,
    "action": "register",
    "name": "jeremy bowers"
}

• Login an existing user: If only an email and password URL parameter are sent, the route will attempt to login the specified user. Success will return a user's _id, a success flag and an action key with the value login. It will also return a cookie-friendly pipe-delimited list of session _id's as votes. Failure will return an error message with success false and a message that a matching user cannot be found.

{
    "action": "login",
    "votes": "ef16edee-2292-49c8-b990-4d52b77529eb|d2650553-9e4f-4dc2-adee-f831419cf3e0|60b27f91-9506-498c-8758-90edfa1ad0b1",
    "_id": "638d66e1-3304-4d86-8224-5149d4dedbb9",
    "name": "jeremy bowers",
    "success": true
}

Route /api/session/action

This route expects a user parameter that contains a valid _id for an existing User. It also expects a session title and description, though these are not absolutely required, only rather quite nice to have. Using this information, the app will create a new Session object with these fields and return the newly created Session's _id and a success key. If a valid User could not be found, it will return an error.

{
    "action": "create",
    "session": "34c0ef1b-8d9d-41ff-8819-e079ba0e6157",
    "success": true
}

Route /api/vote/action

This route expects a user parameter and a session parameter where each resolves to an _id field of a valid User and Session respectively. The app will query the database to establish that both the User and the Session exist. If both exist, it will see if any existing Vote objects exist for this User and Session combination.

• If there is no existing Vote for this User on this Session, the app will create a vote and update the Session's vote total.

• If there is an existing Vote for this User on this Session, the app will delete that vote and update the Session's vote total.

Tests

To run tests, do fab tests.