Data API, database migration scripts, and backend services for the Podverse ecosystem
If you are looking to run this app or contribute to Podverse for the first time, please read the sections that are relevant for you in our CONTRIBUTE.md file in the podverse-ops repo. Among other things, that file contains instructions for running a local instance of the Podverse database.
We use yarn and maintain a yarn.lock file, but it's not really a requirement for you to use yarn. This documentation uses npm in examples, but we generally use the yarn equivalent commands.
For local development, environment variables are provided by a local .env file. You can find a link to example .env files in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
npm installnpm run devInstructions for this can be found in the podverse-ops CONTRIBUTING.md file.
If you are creating a database from scratch, and not using the populateDatabase command explained in the CONTRIBUTE.md file, then you will need to populate the database with categories.
npm run dev:seeds:categoriesPodverse maintains its own podcast directory, and parses RSS feeds to populate it with data.
However, in prod Podverse syncs its database with the Podcast Index API, the world's largest open podcast directory, and the maintainers of the "Podcasting 2.0" RSS spec.
We run scripts in a cron interval that request from PI API a list of all the podcasts that it has detected updates in over the past X minutes, and then add those podcast IDs to an Amazon SQS queue for parsing, and then our parser containers, which run continuously, pull items from the queue, run our parser logic over it, then save the parsed data to our database.
If you'd like to run your own full instance of Podverse and would like a thorough explanation of the processes involved, please contact us and we can document it.
TODO: explain the Matomo setup
We used to have a more detailed README file, but I removed most of the content, since it is unnecessary for most local development workflows, and the information it was getting out-of-date. If you're looking for more info though, you can try digging through our old README file here.