/postar

postAr a simple service for temporary, globally writable pastes

Primary LanguageJavaScript

- postAr -

The beautifully simple post/paste tool.

What and Why

Postar makes it dead simple to push data from anywhere right to your browser. It is ideal if you just quickly need to get a value from a remote system.

It is not intended to compete with pastebin or similar services.

'What's different?' You ask?

  • dead simple data push - stupid simple "API"
  • easily overwriteable data - just push again
  • temporary - post count limit (old posts get kicked), in memory

The use cases are:

  • You need to get ip address of an embedded device (and dyndns is too much overhead and/or you need the internal ip)
  • want to get quickly updating values from a sensor (simple overwrite)
  • share some information and make it disappear from the internet again just seconds later (just make another push to overwrite it)

Why I created it

I needed to know the IP address of a headless RaspberryPi which it got from the company's dhcp server. Dyndns would have given me the public IP, so I looked for a website to which the Pi could post data (its ifconfig output) repeatedly, where I could easily access it from another pc. Since I couldn't find one and the APIs from all the paste* websites were way too complex for this, I created postAr. Now you and me can easily accomplish this task via:

while true; do
	ifconfig | curl --data-binary @- http://post.paukl.at/post/pi-ip ; sleep 60;
done

... and always know its IP by looking at /get/pi-ip

Go go go

npm install
npm start

... and browse to http://localhost:8888/

To see (very simple/limited) statistics of the current postAr instance (number of gets/posts that actually got/updated data) go to /stats

To configure postAr's behaviour, create a config.json file and override values from the config object (see postar.js).

If you want to deploy postAr on your server, check out the misc folder which contains nginx and supervisord configs.

I can haz tests?

npm install -g mocha
mocha



by Paul Klingelhuber (2013)