🥓 Baconator (local) 🥓

This app sets up a static site generator on localhost. Read more about it on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog.

A quick note on the name: In 2018, we began designing and implementing a new caching layer for ProPublica’s website. Inspired by how static site generators “bake a page out,” we referred to it as the bake-n-ator, which quickly became baconator. Also, naming things is hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Setup

Prerequisites

Docker compose

Running the App

To run, clone repo and use docker-compose, from the root:

> git clone https://github.com/propublica/fakenator.git
> cd fakenator/
> docker-compose build && docker-compose up

After docker builds the web and database servers, you'll need to navigate to http://localhost:8888/ to set the origin.

The first time you browse to a new page, it will 404 and queue that page for generation. Your browser should refresh after 5 seconds and load the cached content. On subsequent visits to the same page, this app will serve from it cache. If a cache row has expired, its corresponding page will be queued for regeneration.
note the first time you browse your cached site you may need to refresh a couple of times if your hosting css or helper scripts at the same origin. It can take some time for these assets to get written into cache.

Baconator Elements

Reverse Proxy
This script, which is configured to receive all requests to the server.

Data Store
MySQL table, defined here. Houses cache, served by the reverse proxy script.

Queue Worker
This script, which is set up to run on loop.

Queue
MySQL table, defined here. Holds pages to be regenerated -- managed by queue worker script.

Origin
Set up when bootstrapping this application.

Under the Hood

Accessing the database

In order to access the DB, the docker rig needs to be running, and you'll need a MySQL client, configured with the following:

server: 127.0.0.1
user: docker
pass: docker
port: 33306
schema: cache

Useful queries

To see all your cached pages:

select * from `cache`.`dataStore`

To invalidate all caches (so that they will be regenerated after the next visit to that page):

update `cache`.`dataStore` set `expiry` = "0" where `key` like '%'

To delete all caches (to start over or before swapping in new origin):

truncate `cache`.`dataStore`

To swap in a new origin (run sql then browse to http://localhost:8888/):

truncate `cache`.`info`

To view pending items to be generated in cache:

select *  from `cache`.`queue`