I built this API endpoint in anticipation of a change I never actually
made! I'll just remove it for now, leaning toward cleanuppery over
holding onto something I'm not sure about.
The Neopets Media Archive is a service that mirrors `images.neopets.com`
over time! Right now we're starting by just loading manifests, and
using them to replace the hacks we used for determining the Alt Style
PNG and SVG URLs; but with time, I want to load *all* customization
media files, to have our own secondary file source that isn't dependent
on Neopets to always be up.
Impress 2020 already caches manifest files, but this strategy is
different in two ways:
1. We're using the filesystem rather than a database column. (That is,
manifest data is kinda duplicated in the system right now!) This is
because I intend to go in a more file-y way long-term anyway, to
load more than just the manifests.
2. Impress 2020 guesses at the manifest URLs by pattern, and reloads
them on a regular basis. Instead, we use the modeling system: when
TNT changes the URL of a manifest by appending a new `?v=` query
string to it, this system will consider it a new URL, and will load
the new copy accordingly.
Fun fact, I actually have been prototyping some of this stuff in a side
project I'd named `impress-media-server`! It's a little Sinatra app
that indeed *does* save all the files needed for customization, and can
generate lightweight lil preview iframes and images pretty easily. I
had initially been planning this as a separate service, but after
thinking over the arch a bit, I think it'll go smoother to just give
the main app all the same access and awareness—and I wrote it all in
Ruby and plain HTML/JS/CSS, so it should be pretty easy to port over
bit-by-bit!
Anyway, only Alt Styles use this for now, but my motivation is to be
able to use more-correct asset URL logic to be able to finally swap
over wardrobe-2020's item search to impress.openneo.net's item search
API endpoint—which will get "Items You Own" searches working again, and
whittle down one of the last big things Impress 2020 can do that the
main app can't. Let's see how it goes!
I've moved the support secret into the encrypted credentials file, and
moved the origin into a top-level custom config value in the
environment files, with different defaults per environment but still
the ability to override it. (I don't use this, but it feels polite to
not actually *demand* that people use port 4000, y'know?)
There's a bit happening behind the scenes of this change. Previously,
we kept a `SECRET_TOKEN` environment variable in `production.env`, and
used a `secret_token.rb` initializer to wire it up as the
`secret_key_base`.
In this change, we move to Rails's new-ish (two years old :p) encrypted
credentials system. Now, we set a `RAILS_MASTER_KEY` environment
variable in the deployed `production.env` instead (and in our local
`.env.production` in the project root for managing it), and we can run
`rails credentials:edit` to open the encrypted file in a text editor.
Inside, the content is just:
```yml
secret_key_base: "<OUR_SECRET_KEY>"
```
This indirection doesn't exactly do much for us functionally; it's just
the more standard way of achieving what our `secret_token.rb` situation
was achieving.
We could also migrate other secrets into there, and I just might! That
would simplify duplication between `/deploy/files/production.env` and
`/.env.production`, at any rate! The main notable one is
`MATCHU_EMAIL_PASSWORD` for sending auth emails from
`matchu@openneo.net` (and there's also a Stripe token that we don't
actually use in the app these days, those codepaths are old bones). Oh
and there's also the `IMPRESS_2020_SUPPORT_SECRET`!
Anyway, the motivation for this was to remove the warning when starting
the app that Devise is trying to use the deprecated
`Rails.application.secrets` method. I was expecting to have to do
[the workaround shared here](https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/issues/5644#issuecomment-1804626431),
but it turns out whatever default behavior Devise does under the hood
is happy enough with our new decision to use the credentials file, and
the deprecation warning is gone! Ok neat!
Mostly this is just me testing out what it would look like to
modularize the app more… I've noticed that some concerns, like
fundraising, are just not relevant to most of the app, and being able
to lock them away inside subfolders feels like it'll help tidy up
long folder lists.
Notably, I haven't touched the models case yet, because I worry that
might be a bit more complex, whereas everything else seems pretty
well-isolated? We'll try it out!
I'm not really using this lately, and it _only_ creates vulnerability
surface area when not in use; so, while I'm pretty sure we locked this
down correctly to only admin accounts, I'm disabling it just as good
practice. We can add this back later if we need it again!
A little architecture trick here! DTI 2020 authorizes support staff
requests by means of a secret token, instead of user account stuff. And
our support tools still all call DTI 2020 APIs.
So here, we bridge the gap: we copy DTI 2020's support secret to this
app's environment variables (I needed to update
`deploy/files/production.env` and run `bin/deploy:setup` for this!),
then users with the new `support_secret` flag have it added to their
HTML documents in the meta tags. Then, the JS reads the meta tag.
I also fixed an issue in the `deploy/setup.yml` playbook, where I had
temporarily commented some stuff out to skip steps one time, and forgot
to uncomment them after oops lol!
To activate this, I created a `.env.development` file in my project
root, with the following content:
```env
IMPRESS_2020_ORIGIN=http://localhost:4000
```
Then, I started impress-2020 with `yarn dev --port=4000`.
Now, the app loads from there, hooray!! It even fixes that obnoxious
pet state ID bug that happens when you run against the production db lol
Been wanting this for a while in theory, gonna actually do it now!
The motivation is that I want to turn up the timeout for loading pets,
because the Neopets endpoints are slower today with the NC UC release -
but I can already predict that under our current architecture that will
be a problem, because it'll block up our request queue!
Falcon uses Ruby's relatively-new async system to *not* have requests
block on upstream requests, and my understanding is that this behavior
is plug-and-play. Let's see how it goes!
Oh yeah, a long-standing limitation. Good thing we're better at stuff
now!
This is also probably the real cause of the weird number of slight
discrepancies between main DTI and DTI 2020 when I eyeballed stuff lol
oh, well, that and the missing default-lists. A bit messy!
In impress-2020, we do a big slow query to figure out which users have
been active in trades recently. Now, we cache that timestamp on the
User model.
This won't have any immediate effect; it's to clear the way for Classic
DTI to receive the better trade ratios feature people like from 2020.
I also added some unit testing infra because I finally wanted it! for
all the ways you can trigger this timestamp lol
Note too that this is a bit of an unusually complex migration, but my
hope is that the batching and query structure and such helps it run
surprisingly fast! 🤞
So this was a slightly wrong error message, what was happening was:
1. Trying to load the image hash for this pet, by looking them up at
https://pets.neopets.com/cpn/PET_NAME/1/1.png and seeing what URL it
redirects to.
2. But pets.neopets.com was rejecting our User-Agent string, which
would've been just "Ruby", since we hadn't set it otherwise. I guess
that's an explicitly banned string?
I also found that the kind of more-helpful User-Agent string I like to
write was being rejected, and I could only get it to accept something
very simple? So that's what we're using now, I guess!!
Building toward replacing more of the 2020 data sources! I think this is
an endpoint that benefits from bulk loading, esp with the way the item
page previews work. I also like taking the concept of "canonical" out of
the GQL interface, and instead just loading for each of the 50 species
and letting the client decide. (And then it can fast-swap between them!)
There was a static page explaining it, which we no longer link to; and
there was an unused field in the User model for who was a beta tester
for it. Goodbye!
I noticed when running `rails routes` that there's a lot of routes for
major unused Rails features, like storage. I didn't look deeply enough
into ActiveStorage to know if I was risking accepting arbitrary file
uploads, I just figured, if I disable it (which simplifies the app
footprint anyway), then I can be certain! So, goodbye!
Preparing a better endpoint for wardrobe-2020 to use! I deleted the
now-unused swf_assets#index endpoint, and replaced it with an
"appearances" concept that isn't exactly reflected in the database
models but is a _lot_ easier for clients to work with imo.
Note that this was a big part of the motivation for the recent
`manifest_url` work—in this draft, I'm probably gonna have the client
request the manifest, rather than use impress-2020's trick of caching
it in the database! There's a bit of a perf penalty, but I think that's
a simpler starting point, and I have a hunch I'll be able to make up
the perf difference once we have the impress-media-server managing more
of these responsibilities.
This hasn't worked for a while, and I don't know an API off the top of
my head to drop in for it. Let's just delete it for now, and revisit it
later if we want to!
It shows up in development always, and if you're logged in as Me
Specifically in production!
I'm using this to poke at memory usage for pages that seem suspicious.
I don't know why our app reliably grows so large in RAM, but my hunch is
that maybe there are some pages that just use a truly large amount to
begin with - and I've learned Ruby doesn't release memory back after
it's GC'd, it just grows the process and keeps the free space to itself
in its own heap!
So I'm just eyeing pages that I know *can* have a lot going on, and
seeing what I find!
Okay, so I've kept `database.yml` using the new username and password
`impress_dev`, cuz I like that it helps clarify that it's dev stuff and
is impossible to confuse with prod. (I updated my local setup to match!)
But hardcoding `host: db` into here breaks my local setup where the
database _isn't_ at the hostname `db`. So I add a way for new optional
database URL environment variables to get merged in with these settings,
and then configured the dev container to use that—and just in the most
limited override possible, to avoid duplicating stuff we don't need to.
(I could've just used the same names `DATABASE_URL_{PRIMARY,OPENNEO_ID}`
for this, but idk, I think it's confusing to have the same one for both
dev and prod, even though Rails _does_ basically do this; see below.)
Normally, the environment variable `DATABASE_URL` just _does_ this, and
you don't need to include a `url` key at all to get this behavior. But
since we've got the legacy two-database thing going on, we do this
instead! If we were to merge the `openneo_id.users` table into the
primary database, we could simplify this!
I missed two things:
1) `rake` wasn't available in the path (surprising but ok!), so I replaced it with the more modern and more portable `bin/rails` invocation.
2) Without specifying a `host`, Rails was trying to connect with the database over a socket instead of over a port. Here, we tell it where to actually connect!
I think I'll need to make some tweaks here, since this isn't compatible with my _own_ local setup—maybe I'll revert `database.yml`, and have the dev container use the `DATABASE_URL` environment variable to override it?
But whatever, this is working for now, and that's exciting to me!
Note: On my machine, the install step hangs for a loooong time, to the point where I usually give up. On Codespaces, it also took a while at the same step (`Installing devise-encrpytable`), but eventually got through it. Maybe on my machine it would work if I'm more patient? Idk! But it's good to see it working on something!!
I cleared the references to the Neopia server (old thing responsible
for pet loading without blocking the Rails app) out of here a while ago,
but didn't clear out this config value!
