2025-02-06 Meeting notes

Last meeting

• Covered tools and data pipeline.

  • 2 repos: api-tools and nebula-api

    • api-tools: scraping, parsing, and uploading

    • nebula-api: talks between mongodb and user

Tasks/issues

• Some L1 tasks have opened up from people who didn’t do them last semester

  • Fix/suppress some annoying chromedp errors

  • fix parser bug pulling the room as “No Meeting“ and others

  • add /events/:day/:building/:room/sections route

  • unit testing!

    • Josh will give some examples by next meeting for anyone to do the rest of them

  • on hold tasks - feel free to do if interested

    • astra isn’t as useful as we thought so schemas for that scraper are on hold

    • changing api-tools to not have to upload and replace all the data on mongodb each scrape+parse+upload

How the team works

• Josh puts out tasks in batches, pick one up and work on it

• Feel free to work in groups

rooms-route branch

• route

  • adds OPTIONS and GET routes

• controller

  • pulls data from mongodb

• work already done on the database

  • aggregations in the database to transform data

  • sections creates the rooms and events views

    • rooms shows every classroom

    • events shows every section on a day

  • doing this in mongo helps keep the code from being messy

Tech stack: stuff to learn

• Language: GoLang

• Database: MongoDB

• Scraping: ChromeDP

• Routing: Gin

• Check #announcements in the API channel for resources

Tool automation - big area of contribution

• The tools all run in CLI and could be automated

  • But there always seem to be a few issues to overcome in scraping

  • And the rate we scrape at is slow because coursebook locks out out at some point

    • IP rate limit means you can only scrape 1-2 semesters

  • CAPTCHAs pop up at random times and stop all scraping

Cloud storage

• Store images and videos

  • Not in MongoDB

• Google Could Storage holds large binary files called:

  • buckets: like directories, one for each nebula projects

  • objects: items in buckets

• Why not just have each nebula project use their own Google Cloud Storage

  • the APIs are difficult and over complicated

  • API’s goal is to make managing buckets and objects easy

  • stuff like basic crud operations /bucket/create, etc.

How to get the nebula-api running?

• You’ll need Go installed

• Clone the repo with git

• Copy the .env.template file to a file named .env and fill out at least the DATABASE_URI

• Run make build on mac or .\build.bat on windows

• Run ./go-api.exe to run the API and go to http://localhost:8080/swagger/index.html to test it

• You can also build it with docker which is what we do to deploy the API

Questions

• What makes Google Cloud Storage actually difficult to use?

  • Boilerplate basically

    • Having the same code in each project and credentials in each

• We don’t use Kubernetes