Hacker News Digest

Hacker News Digest is a little web application to browse the SQLite database of Hacker News stories and comments created with hn2sqlite

Requirements

• sqlite3 and a web server, obviously
• Lua 5.2
• lsqlitelib Lua bindings for sqlite (lua52 branch)

Setup with althttpd

• Compile lsqlitelib and copy sqlite.so to HackerNewsDigest/default.website. Alternatively, set LUA_CPATH to an appropiate value so that Lua can find the module (e.g export LUA_CPATH="$HOME/lsqlite3lib/?.so;./?.so")

• move the database created with hn2sqlite to HackerNewsDigest/default.website. The app expects the database to be called hn-all-stories+comments.sqlite; change as appropiate.

• Start the web server:

    TZ= ~/althttpd/althttpd -logfile logfile -root $HOME/althttpd/HackerNewsDigest/ -port 8080
  

The TZ enviroment variable is set to an empty string to get timestamps as UTC, rather than local time.

Browsing stories and comments

The application serves just two URLs: one for stories listed by date and one for the comments of a specific story.

• The story URL looks like http://localhost:8080/nph-hn.lua/stories/$year/$month/$day/$hour/$min?author=$author. The ?author=... part and all date and time fields are optional, so that for example http://localhost:8080/nph-hn.lua/stories/2013/12/31 lists all the stories for 31 Dec 2013.

• The comments URL looks like http://localhost:8080/nph-hn.lua/comments/$objectID but I don't think this is too important as you would access it normally from the stories page.

Acknowdledgements

• This service draws much code and ideas from MVC Web Development with Kepler.
• The javascript code for collapsing/expanding threaded comments is taken from https://github.com/niyazpk/Collapsible-comments-for-Hacker-News
• The CSS code of the story listing page is original from repo.or.cz

License

HackerNewsDigest is distributed under the MIT license.