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>
Bibliogram links require a "/u/" prefix when viewing a user's profile,
which does not match Instagram's URL paradigm. This adds a bit of logic
for Bibliogram links to prepend this prefix if the user is not visiting
a post (indicated by a "/p/" prefix, which Bibliogram and Instagram BOTH
use) or the home page of an instance (indicated by an empty path value).
Query params were not included when using the "/_/" prefix for farside
links. This extracts the logic for parsing query params into a function
that is then used for both /_/ and non-/_/ links.
Farside now supports redirecting based on a provided link to a "parent"
service, if such a parent service is supported.
For example, a link such as:
farside.link/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
will now redirect to any of the available YouTube related frontends.
This works by matching against a mapping of "parent" service domains
("youtube.com", "reddit.com", etc) to a list of their respective frontend
alternatives (["invidious", "piped"], ["libreddit", "teddit"], etc). A
random element is chosen from this list, and the remainder of Farside's
routing logic proceeds as if the user had chosen the service directly to
begin with.
Closes#37
This adds a straightforward way of preserving Farside's redirecting
behavior in the user's browser history. That way if an instance becomes
unavailable between the 5 min scans, the user can opt to navigate back
one page and be taken to a new instance.
This is accomplished using a single line of JS, and could potentially
work as the default behavior of Farside (with the current default
behavior requiring a path prefix instead). This should be revisited down
the road when more people are using this service.
Query params ("/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" for instance) would previously be
lost in Farside redirects. This now includes them if they were included
in the original request.
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 process of selecting a random (working) instance for a specified
service has been moved out of the router and into lib/farside.ex. Moving
forward, the router itself should have very simple and easy to follow
logic for all paths.
This introduces a number of new changes:
- Services are now inserted into redis with a prefix prepended to the
key name. This allows for easier filtering to get only live instances.
- The home page now uses an eex template for displaying all live
instances for every service, determined by the last update
- A "last_updated" field was added
- farside.ex was added to contain all functionality related to querying
for instances (WIP)
- Other improvements
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.
2021-11-07 12:29:06 -07:00
Renamed from lib/privacy_revolver/router.ex (Browse further)
