Ashurbanipal is an aggregator API that serves Hacker News' top 50 stories. It is built using Elixir/OTP and without using Phoenix or a database to store data. It uses ETS to store Hacker News' stories in memory.
It was named after the last great Assyrian king who was fond of collecting clay tablets in his library. He is the reason why we still have the Epic of Gilgamesh.
- JSON API over HTTP
Clone the repository and run the following commands:
If you're running a Unix-like system:
export MIX_ENV=prod
If you're running Windows:
setx MIX_ENV "prod"
After the environment variable is set, run the following:
mix release
Finally, run:
_build/prod/rel/ashurbanipal/bin/ashurbanipal start
To run the test suite, run the following command:
mix test
This projects inteds to use pure OTP, no databases or Phoenix. When the application starts, the Supervisor will initialize the Ashurbanipal.Stories and the Ashurbanipal.Scheduler GenServers.
It will also start a Cowboy server that will handle requests via the Ashurbanipal.Router module.
The Scheduler will mainly do two things:
- It will interact with the
StoriesGenServer in order to populate the:storiesETS table with data harvested with theAshurbanipal.HNClientmodule. - It will schedule itself to run in 5 minutes.
The ideas is to refresh the ETS :stories table every 5 minutes with fresh data from the Hacker News Stories API.
I'm glad you ask. The application will update the ETS table with nil.
The HTTP JSON API is available at localhost:4000/stories. A GET request to that endpoint will get you Hacker News Top 50 stories as JSON.
You can also get single stories by specifying the story ID like this:
GET localhost:4000/stories/<ID>
You can also paginate! Like this:
GET localhost:4000/stories?page=1
That will get you 10 stories as the first page. There are 5 pages in total. If you pass an invalid page number the endpoint will return all stories by default.
👤 Josias Alvarado
- GitHub: @pointerish
- Twitter: @pointerish
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome!
Feel free to check the issues page.
I had a lot of fun writing this simple application. I was originally set to implement a WebSockets API, but I was unable to implement this due to my inexperience with WebSockets and time constraints. I will add it in the following days, mainly because of the educational value of it.