gifmachine

A Machine for Gifs

• Need an excuse to show a gif to your coworkers?
• Need a use for that Raspberry Pi that isn't doing anything useful?
• Need a web-scale solution to your animated gif needs?

Presenting the newest GMaaS (Gif Machine as a Service) solution for your tech company with a startup culture: gifmachine

What actually is it?

• gifmachine is a Ruby Sinatra app that provides a dirty interface for enjoying gifs with your coworkers. gifmachine provides a HTTP API for posting gifs and meme text to overlay.
• gifmachine allows your coworkers to complain about company_x's broken API when it goes down and laugh as the internet catches fire.
• gifmachine is designed to be run in kiosk mode on an unused computer and monitor, it's just a webpage that puts the gif meme in fullscreen.

How does it work?

It mostly does! When it is working well...

• gifmachine uses WebSockets to send out updates to connected clients.
• gifmachine stores everything in a database (developed with Postgres, but it shouldn't be too hard to change that).
• gifmachine uses ActiveRecord to save the developer time and calories.

WebSockets?

Setting up locally

1. Get RVM
2. Using RVM, install Ruby 2.7.7 rvm install 2.7.7
3. Get Postgres 14 or newer
4. Run bundle install
5. Create a database locally called gifmachine (you can run: bundle exec rake db:create)
6. Set your RACK_ENV (e.g. export RACK_ENV='development')
7. bundle exec rake db:migrate to load the database schema into the database
8. Set an API password with export GIFMACHINE_PASSWORD=foo
9. Run ruby app.rb to start the server
10. Browse to http://localhost:4567

Posting Gifs

Using curl you can post a gif and some text to register it in the gifmachine

curl --data 'url=<http://www.example.com/somegif.gif>&who=thatAmazingPerson&meme_top=herp&meme_bottom=derp&secret=<your-GIFMACHINE_PASSWORD>' 'http://<yourGifMachineUrl>/gif'

Configuring for Production

To run in production, you will need the following:

• Pass the environment variable RACK_ENV=production
• You will want to setup a Postgres database, and then run bundle exec rake db:create && bundle exec rake db:migrate against it before running the app.
• You will pass in an environment variable DATABASE_URL of the format postgres://username:password@database-url:5432/database-name
• Lastly, you will also want to set a password for the API, via the environment variable GIFMACHINE_PASSWORD.