Finally, a quick hack that actually resulted in something!
Where I work, we have some TV screens that show things like the status of builds and which servers are misbehaving. It also shows occasional funnies, including a random xkcd, which at the moment is the entire page, often so small it is unreadable.
This site enlarges the comics so that they fit to the screen.
- /: Picks a random xkcd comic. Add
?rotate=60to get a new comic every minute (or however many seconds you want). - /latest: Displays the most recent comic.
- /149 (or any other number): Displays the specified comic.
You can add ?full to all endpoints to display the comics without text.
Probably? So long as you're not easily offended. Comics picked by https://xkcd.dpope.uk/ won't have bad words, but that doesn't mean they'll be free of unsuitable themes.
npm install
npm start
Runs on the port specified by the PORT environment variable, or if not set, it defaults to 3000.
If you want to make sure the comics provided don't contain any naughty words, you can specify the BLOCKED_WORDS environment variable, giving your words as a comma-separated list.
e.g. BLOCKED_WORDS=sudo,linux npm start will make sure that any randomly selected comics don't contain 'linux' or 'sudo' in their titles, transcripts and mouseover text.
The Docker build step does not include the comics directory. It has to be bindmounted at runtime so that the container will update the host file with the latest comics. First, build the image. I made a handy build script that you might want to use.
Then, to run as a daemon:
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -v $(pwd)/comics:/usr/src/app/comics xkcdfull
Alternatively, you can use docker-compose. To build, run docker-compose build, and to run, docker-compose up.