homeontheroute

An OTP application providing a public HTTP API that powers Home On The Route, a web app helping you find the perfect neighborhood for your car-free lifestyle.

Home On The Route offers personalized Transit Scores for your area. The Trouble with "Transit Score".

Project status

The project is currently a work in progress and is not ready for use. It is in intermittent development in my free time, as a hobby project.

Development

Architecture

There are two Erlang applications here: hotr_gtfs and hotr_web. The GTFS application has stateless logic for processing GTFS data, while the Web application is an OTP server for processing web requests.

Add GTFS data

This application needs GTFS data. (Tested only with King County Metro's datasets.) Because GTFS data is large, I don't include it in the source repository, so download it yourself: https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/app-center/developer-resources.aspx

The latest King County Metro GTFS dataset is downloaded as part of this project's continuous deployment, so refer to ./.circleci/config.yml for the details.

Install development software

I develop on macOS with IntelliJ IDEA and the Erlang plugin.

Use Homebrew to install additional tools:

$ brew install rebar3

Build

$ rebar3 compile

Test

$ rebar3 eunit

Dialyze

One-time:

$ dialyzer --build_plt --apps erts kernel stdlib eunit ./_build/default/lib

As needed:

$ dialyzer --src src

Run locally

$ rebar3 shell

And look for this output:

===> Booted hotr_gtfs
===> Booted hotr_web

If it fails to start: did you add your own GTFS data?

This is all you need for complete local development.

Now in the shell you can run something like:

TransitTable = ets:whereis(transit_data_top).
trip:optimal_trip_to_stop({trip_config, TransitTable, <<"26860">>, 1}, [{0, walk, 1, <<"18455">>}]).

Now try http://localhost:8080/stops -- it should work!

Quit the shell

1> q().

Deploying to AWS

Install tools

$ brew install awscli
$ brew install awsebcli

First time

This section is to be done just once in your AWS account.

Update ./aws/stack.yml to either use a custom domain name (since homeontheroute.com is taken!), or remove the DomainName resource.
Using either the AWS console or CLI, create a new CloudFormation Stack from ./aws/stack.yml.

This creates a stock Elastic Beanstalk environment, ready for you to deploy this app into it.

Package for deployment

$ docker build -t homeontheroute .

Run Dockerized locally

If you want to test it. This should behave equivalently to the "Run locally" section.

$ docker run -p 8080:8080 homeontheroute

Push to AWS

Follow steps in ./.circleci/config.yml. This is what CircleCI does at each commit, so it's guaranteed to be accurate and up-to-date.

If you are setting up your own CircleCI environment for this project, define these environment variables for the project:

AWS_ACCOUNT_ID
AWS_REGION

philipmw/homeontheroute-api