This removes the dependency on Redis for core app functionality. Rather
than using the key/value store provided by Redis, Farside now uses a
key/val store provided by [cubdb](https://github.com/lucaong/cubdb) for
identical functionality but without reliance on a non-Elixir service.
This solution was chosen instead of ets, because storing instance data
in memory leads to a period of broken functionality whenever the app
restarts and hasn't re-populated instance data yet. It was also chosen
instead of dets, because the documentation for dets was pretty hard to
understand at first glance.
Tests and the CI build were updated to reflect the removed dependency on
Redis.
New environment variable `FARSIDE_DATA_DIR` can be used to point to a
directory where the instance data can be stored by cubdb.
Co-authored-by: Jason Clark <mithereal@gmail.com>
Connection values (such as redis server port and the port to run farside
on) as well as the services json file to use can now be set via
environment variables:
FARSIDE_PORT sets the port for Farside to run on
FARSIDE_REDIS_PORT sets the redis server port for Farside to use
FARSIDE_SERVICES_JSON sets the services json file for Farside to use
This partially addresses the move towards de-listing Cloudflare
instances by default by allowing different services json files to be
used with different redis servers.
See #43
The FARSIDE_NO_ROUTER variable wasn't terribly useful after refactoring
the app to include the update routine internally (rather than available
externally as an elixir script).
Now the only supported environment variable is FARSIDE_TEST, which is
still useful for tests and quick validation of functionality.
Although the current list of queries is only 2 elements ("time" and
"weather"), this allows searches for Whoogle and Searx to be slightly
more random, and potentially avoid any issues with their parent engine
rate limiting them.
Rather than requiring a traditional crontab install, the app now
leverages quantum-core (link below) to schedule the instance update/sync
task every 5 minutes. Some updates as a result:
- The new job is scheduled at runtime in server.ex.
- The update.exs script was refactored to be compiled along with the
rest of the app as instances.ex.
- Scheduler and Server modules were added for creating and executing
the new update task
- All shell scripts were removed, as they are no longer needed
https://github.com/quantum-elixir/quantum-core
Setting the aforementioned env var skips creation of the app router,
which is useful for running update.exs when the main app is already
running (otherwise there's a port conflict).
This introduces a way of throttling requests in a way that makes sense
for the purpose of the app. The app only supports redirecting to one
particular service when browsing, which would seldom be required more
than once per second for normal "human" browsing.
Without this, the service could easily be used to DOS multiple instances
at once. That being said, anyone concerned about someone DOS-ing
multiple instances at once should be aware that this would be trivial to
do with a simple bash script. This is simply a preventative measure to
hopefully deter people from trying to attack all public instances of
private frontends using farside.link.
Note that this throttling applies to all routes in the app, including
the homepage. This could be updated to exclude the homepage I guess,
but I'm not really sure what the use case would be for that.
The name of the project is being refactored from Privacy Revolver to
Farside. The reasoning behind this is:
1. A shorter name is easier to remember
2. It can stand for "FOSS alternative redirecting service" (which I know
doesn't encapsulate all letters from "farside", but it's close enough).
This commit also includes improvements to the update script for
determining how far along the script is.
