TL;DR -- We're seeing if it's possible to run River5 on Glitch. #
Update #2 -- the current demo server has been configured to write all of River5's data into a folder named .data -- this folder is supposed to persist across launches. The proof will be if the server is still updating in 12 hours, i.e. 2:30AM Eastern time.#
Update #1 -- maybe there is a way forward. They do something special with a folder named .data -- and luckily River5 can be told to maintain its data anywhere you like through config.json. We may be back in business here. See the thread for details. #
Yesterday I posted a link to a River5 server running on Glitch, the result of a braintrust query earlier in the day. This was significant because Glitch is easy to get started with for people new to running servers, a good thing, and it's free. Seeing it run River5 was great. Alas, when I came back an hour later, the server had lost its memory of previous stories and had started over. You can see this by watching the dashboard page on the server.#
I found a doc that explains its technical limits, notably:#
Projects sleep after 5 minutes if they are not used, and those running for more than 12 hours are stopped. Both wake again when they receive a HTTP request.#
This is similar to what happens on Heroku with free projects. So I tried what had worked for Heroku, I wrote a script that runs on my desktop that reads a fast page on the server once a minute. It should, according to their warning, keep the server running. #
River5 maintains the data about the feeds its following and the stories it has seen in the local filesystem. That gets recreated when the server is shut down and then restarted. So, even with a keep-alive script, it will lose its memory after 12 hours. #
However this paragraph seems to contradict that conclusion --#
Projects have a limit of 128MB of space on the container. Though things written to '/tmp' don't count towards that, nor do your Node modules, and we use compression to squeeze the most out of that space. Plus, there's an additional 512MB of assets storage space too.#
I'm guessing they have an API for this? Not sure. River5 just keeps JSON files in the filesystem. It uses the Node fs package to read and write. #
I saw a thread on Twitter the other day where some developers were dissing the w3schools website. There are apparently browser plugins that block the site? I don't know why they don't like it, if given a choice to point to this page or this one, I'll generally pick the one on w3schools, because there's a chance that people who don't know Node will understand it, and might learn something, and learning imho is a universal good.#
Similarly, I appreciate it when traveling if people don't make fun of the fact that I don't know where everything is in their hometown, and try to return the favor when people need help finding their way around my hometown. If I know a little bit of their language I try to throw it in -- grazie! prego! buon giorno!#
I like w3schools because they tend to show you the info you need in the order you need it. Other developer docs more often show you stuff in the wrong order, and leave out details that are necessary to understanding the topic. They may work well for experienced programmers, but what's so bad about making what we do more accessible to the non-initiated? #