Peterbe.com

tl;dr; In other words, you can now have multiple servers with crontabber, all talking to a central PostgreSQL for its state, and not have to worry about jobs being started more than exactly once. This will be super useful if your crontabber apps are such that they kick of stored procedures that would freak out if run more than once with the same parameters.

crontabber is an advanced Python program to run cron-like applications in a predictable way. Every app is a Python class with a run method. Example here. Until version 0.18 you had to do locking outside but now the locking has been "internalized". Meaning, if you open two terminals and run python crontabber.py --admin.conf=myconfig.ini in both you don't have to worry about it starting the same apps in parallel.

General, business logic locking

Every app has a state. It's stored in PostgreSQL. It looks like this:

# \d crontabber
              Table "public.crontabber"
    Column    |           Type           | Modifiers
--------------+--------------------------+-----------
 app_name     | text                     | not null
 next_run     | timestamp with time zone |
 first_run    | timestamp with time zone |
 last_run     | timestamp with time zone |
 last_success | timestamp with time zone |
 error_count  | integer                  | default 0
 depends_on   | text[]                   |
 last_error   | json                     |
 ongoing      | timestamp with time zone |
Indexes:
    "crontabber_unique_app_name_idx" UNIQUE, btree (app_name)

The last column, ongoing used to be just for the "curiosity". For example, in Socorro we used that to display a flashing message about which jobs are ongoing right now.

As of version 0.18, this ongoing column is actually used to NOT run apps again. Basically, when started, crontabber figures out which app to run next (assuming it's time to run it) and now the first thing it does is look up if it's ongoing already, and if it is the whole crontabber application exits with an error code of 3.

Sub-second locking

What might happen is that two separate servers which almost perfectly synchronoized clocks might have cron run crontabber at the "exact" same time. Or rather, only a few milliseconds apart. But the database is central so what might happen is that two distinct PostgreSQL connection tries to send a... UPDATE crontabber SET ongoing=now() WHERE app_name='some-app-name' at the very same time.

So how is this solved? The answer is row-level locking. The magic sauce is here. You make a select, by app_name with a suffix of FOR UPDATE WAIT. Imagine two distinct PostgreSQL connections sending this:

BEGIN;
SELECT ongoing FROM crontabber WHERE app_name = 'my-app-name'
FOR UPDATE NOWAIT;

-- do some other stuff in Python

UPDATE crontabber SET ongoing = now() WHERE app_name = 'my-app-name';
COMMIT;

One of them will succeed the other will raise an error. Now all you need to do is catch that raised error, check that it's a row-level locking error and not some other general error. Instead of worrying about the raised error you just accept it and exit the program early.

This screenshot of a test.sql script demonstrates this:

Two terminals lined up and I start one and quickly switch and start the other one

Another way to demonstrate this is to use psycopg2 in a little script:

import threading
import psycopg2


def updater():
    connection = psycopg2.connect('dbname=crontabber_exampleapp')
    cursor = connection.cursor()
    cursor.execute("""
    SELECT ongoing FROM crontabber WHERE app_name = 'bar'
    FOR UPDATE NOWAIT
    """)
    cursor.execute("""
    UPDATE crontabber SET ongoing = now() WHERE app_name = 'bar'
    """)
    print("JOB CAN START!")
    connection.commit()


# Use threads to simulate starting two connections virtually 
# simultaneously.
threads = [
    threading.Thread(target=updater),
    threading.Thread(target=updater),
]
for thread in threads:
    thread.start()
for thread in threads:
    thread.join()

The output of this is:

▶ python /tmp/test.py
JOB CAN START!
Exception in thread Thread-1:
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
OperationalError: could not obtain lock on row in relation "crontabber"

With threads, you never know exactly which one will work and which one will not. In this case it was Thread-1 that sent its SQL a couple of nanoseconds too late.

In conclusion...

As of version 0.18 of crontabber, all locking is now dealt with inside crontabber. You still kick off crontabber from cron or crontab but if your cron does kick it off whilst it's still in the midst of running a job, it will simply exit with an error code of 2 or 3.

In other words, you can now have multiple servers with crontabber, all talking to a central PostgreSQL for its state, and not have to worry about jobs being started more than exactly once. This will be super useful if your crontabber apps are such that they kick of stored procedures that would freak out if run more than once with the same parameters.

Earlier this year we started using Fanout.io in Air Mozilla to enhance the experience for users awaiting content updates. Here I hope to flesh out its details a bit to inspire others to deploy a similar solution.

What It Is

First of all, Fanout.io is basically a service that handles your WebSockets. You put in some of Fanout's JavaScript into your site that handles a persistent WebSocket connection between your site and Fanout.io. And to push messages to your user you basically send them to Fanout.io from the server and they "forward" it to the WebSocket.

The HTML page looks like this:

<html>
<body>

  <h1>Web Page</h1>

<!-- replace the FANOUT_REALM_ID with the ID you get in the Fanout.io admin page -->
<script 
  src="https://{{ FANOUT_REALM_ID }}.fanoutcdn.com/bayeux/static/faye-browser-1.1.2-fanout1-min.js"
></script>
<script src="fanout.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

And the fanout.js script looks like this:

window.onload = function() {
  // replace the FANOUT_REALM_ID with the ID you get in the Fanout.io admin page
  var client = new Faye.Client('https://{{ FANOUT_REALM_ID }}.fanoutcdn.com/bayeux')
  client.subscribe('/mycomments', function(data) {  
     console.log('Incoming updated data from the server:', data);
  })
};

And in server it looks something like this:

from django.conf import settings
import fanout

fanout.realm = settings.FANOUT_REALM_ID
fanout.key = settings.FANOUT_REALM_KEY


def post_comment(request):
    """A django view function that saves the posted comment"""
   text = request.POST['comment']
   saved_comment = Comment.objects.create(text=text, user=request.user)
   fanout.publish('mycomments', {'new_comment': saved_comment.id})
   return http.JsonResponse({'comment_posted': True})

Note that, in the client-side code, there's no security since there's no authentication. Any client can connect to any channel. So it's important that you don't send anything sensitive. In fact, you should think of this pattern simply as a hint that something has changed. For example, here's a slightly more fleshed out example of how you'd use the subscription.

window.onload = function() {
  // replace the FANOUT_REALM_ID with the ID you get in the Fanout.io admin page
  var client = new Faye.Client('https://{{ FANOUT_REALM_ID }}.fanoutcdn.com/bayeux')
  client.subscribe('/mycomments', function(data) {  
    if (data.new_comment) {
      // server says a new comment has been posted in the server
      $.json('/comments', function(response) {
        $('#comments .comment').remove();
        $.each(response.comments, function(comment) {        
          $('<div class="comment">')
          .append($('<p>').text(comment.text))
          .append($('<span>').text('By: ' + comment.user.name))
          .appendTo('#comments');
        });
      });
    }
  })
};

Yes, I know jQuery isn't hip but it demonstrates the pattern well. Also, in the real world you might not want to ask the server for all comments (and re-render) but instead do an AJAX query to get all new comments since some parameter or something.

Why It's Awesome

It's awesome because you can have a simple page that updates near instantly when the server's database is updated. The alternative would be to do a setInterval loop that frequently does an AJAX query to see if there's new content to update. This is cumbersome because it requires a lot heavier AJAX queries. You might want to make it secure so you engage sessions that need to be looked up each time. Or, since you're going to request it often you have to write a very optimized server-side endpoint that is cheap to query often.

And last but not least, if you rely on an AJAX loop interval, you have to pick a frequency that your server can cope with and it's likely to be in the range of several seconds or else it might overload the server. That means that updates are quite delayed.

But maybe most important, you don't need to worry about running a WebSocket server. It's not terribly hard to do one yourself on your laptop with a bit of Node Express or Tornado but now you have yet another server to maintain and it, internally, needs to be connected to a "pub-sub framework" like Redis or a full blown message queue.

Alternatives

Fanout.io is not the only service that offers this. The decision to use Fanout.io was taken about a year ago and one of the attractive things it offers is that it's got a freemium option which is ideal for doing local testing. The honest truth is that I can't remember the other justifications used to chose Fanout.io over its competitors but here are some alternatives that popped up on a quick search:

• Socketize
• Pusher
• pushping

It seems they all (including Fanout.io) has freemium plans, supports authentication, REST APIs (for sending and for querying connected clients' stats).

There are also some more advanced feature packed solutions like Meteor, Firebase and GunDB that act more like databases that are connected via WebSockets or alike. For example, you can have a database as a "conduit" for pushing data to a client. Meaning, instead of sending the data from the server directly you save it in a database which syncs to the connected clients.

Lastly, I've heard that Heroku has a really neat solution that does something similar whereby it sets up something similar as an extension.

Let's Get Realistic

The solution sketched out above is very simplistic. There are a lot more fine-grained details that you'd probably want to zoom in to if you're going to do this properly.

Throttling

In Air Mozilla, we call fanout.publish(channel, message) from a post_save ORM signal. If you have a lot of saves for some reason, you might be sending too many messages to the client. A throttling solution, per channel, simply makes sure your "callback" gets called only once per channel per small time frame. Here's the solution we employed:

window.Fanout = (function() {
  var _locks = {};
  return {
    subscribe: function subscribe(channel, callback) {
      _client.subscribe(channel, function(data) {
          if (_locks[channel]) {
              // throttled
              return;
          }
          _locks[channel] = true;
          callback(data);
          setTimeout(function() {
              _locks[channel] = false;
          }, 500);
      });        
    };
  }
})();

Subresource Integrity

Subresource integrity is an important web security technique where you know in advance a hash of the remote JavaScript you include. That means that if someone hacks the result of loading https://cdn.example.com/somelib.js the browser compares the hash of that with a hash mentioned in the <script> tag and refuses to load it if the hash doesn't match.

In the example of Fanout.io it actually looks like this:

<script 
  src="https://{{ FANOUT_REALM_ID }}.fanoutcdn.com/bayeux/static/faye-browser-1.1.2-fanout1-min.js"
  crossOrigin="anonymous"
  integrity="sha384-/9uLm3UDnP3tBHstjgZiqLa7fopVRjYmFinSBjz+FPS/ibb2C4aowhIttvYIGGt9"
></script>

The SHA you get from the Fanout.io documentation. It requires, and implies, that you need to use an exact version of the library. You can't use it like this: <script src="https://cdn.example/somelib.latest.min.js" ....

WebSockets vs. Long-polling

Fanout.io's JavaScript client follows a pattern that makes it compatible with clients that don't support WebSockets. The first technique it uses is called long-polling. With this the server basically relys on standard HTTP techniques but the responses are long lasting instead. It means the request simply takes a very long time to respond and when it does, that's when data can be passed.

This is not a problem for modern browsers. They almost all support WebSocket but you might have an application that isn't a modern browser.

Anyway, what Fanout.io does internally is that it first creates a long-polling connection but then shortly after tries to "upgrade" to WebSockets if it's supported. However, the projects I work only need to support modern browsers and there's a trick to tell Fanout to go straight to WebSockets:

var client = new Faye.Client('https://{{ FANOUT_REALM_ID }}.fanoutcdn.com/bayeux', {
    // What this means is that we're opting to have
    // Fanout start with fancy-pants WebSocket and
    // if that doesn't work it falls back on other
    // options, such as long-polling.
    // The default behaviour is that it starts with
    // long-polling and tries to "upgrade" itself
    // to WebSocket.
    transportMode: 'fallback'
});

Fallbacks

In the case of Air Mozilla, it already had a traditional solution whereby it does a setInterval loop that does an AJAX query frequently.

Because the networks can be flaky or because something might go wrong in the client, the way we use it is like this:

var RELOAD_INTERVAL = 5;  // seconds

if (typeof window.Fanout !== 'undefined') {
    Fanout.subscribe('/' + container.data('subscription-channel-comments'), function(data) {
        // Supposedly the comments have changed.
        // For security, let's not trust the data but just take it
        // as a hint that it's worth doing an AJAX query
        // now.
        Comments.load(container, data);
    });
    // If Fanout doesn't work for some reason even though it
    // was made available, still use the regular old
    // interval. Just not as frequently.
    RELOAD_INTERVAL = 60 * 5;
}
setInterval(function() {
    Comments.reload_loop(container);
}, RELOAD_INTERVAL * 1000);

Use Fanout Selectively/Progressively

In the case of Air Mozilla, there are lots of pages. Some don't ever need a WebSocket connection. For example, it might be a simple CRUD (Create Update Delete) page. So, for that I made the whole Fanout functionality "lazy" and it only gets set up if the page has some JavaScript that knows it needs it.

This also has the benefit that the Fanout resource loading etc. is slightly delayed until more pressing things have loaded and the DOM is ready.

You can see the whole solution here. And the way you use it here.

Have Many Channels

You can have as many channels as you like. Don't create a channel called comments when you can have a channel called comments-123 where 123 is the ID of the page you're on for example.

In the case of Air Mozilla, there's a channel for every single page. If you're sitting on a page with a commenting widget, it doesn't get WebSocket messages about newly posted comments on other pages.

Conclusion

We've now used Fanout for almost a year in our little Django + jQuery app and it's been great. The management pages in Air Mozilla use AngularJS and the integration looks like this in the event manager page:

window.Fanout.subscribe('/events', function(data) {
    $scope.$apply(lookForModifiedEvents);
});

Fanout.io's been great to us. Really responsive support and very reliable. But if I were to start a fresh new project that needs a solution like this I'd try to spend a little time to investigate the competitors to see if there are some neat features I'd enjoy.

UPDATE

Fanout reached out to help explain more what's great about Fanout.io

"One of Fanout's biggest differentiators is that we use and promote open technologies/standards. For example, our service supports the open Bayeux protocol, and you can connect to it with any compatible client library, such as Faye. Nearly all competing services have proprietary protocols. This "open" aspect of Fanout aligns pretty well with Mozilla's values, and in fact you'd have a hard time finding any alternative that works the same way."

tl;dr; Use raven's ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport transport class to send Google Analytics pageview trackings asynchronously to Google Analytics to collect pageviews that aren't actually browser pages.

We have an API on our Django site that was not designed from the ground up. We had a bunch of internal endpoints that were used by the website. So we simply exposed those as API endpoints that anybody can query. All we did was wrap certain parts carefully as to not expose private stuff and we wrote a simple web page where you can see a list of all the endpoints and what parameters are needed. Later we added auth-by-token.

Now the problem we have is that we don't know which endpoints people use and, as equally important, which ones people don't use. If we had more stats we'd be able to confidently deprecate some (for easier maintanenace) and optimize some (to avoid resource overuse).

Our first attempt was to use statsd to collect metrics and display those with graphite. But it just didn't work out. There are just too many different "keys". Basically, each endpoint (aka URL, aka URI) is a key. And if you include the query string parameters, the number of keys just gets nuts. Statsd and graphite is better when you have about as many keys as you have fingers on one hand. For example, HTTP error codes, 200, 302, 400, 404 and 500.

Also, we already use Google Analytics to track pageviews on our website, which is basically a measure of how many people render web pages that have HTML and JavaScript. Google Analytic's UI is great and powerful. I'm sure other competing tools like Mixpanel, Piwik, Gauges, etc are great too, but Google Analytics is reliable, likely to stick around and something many people are familiar with.

So how do you simulate pageviews when you don't have JavaScript rendering? The answer; using plain HTTP POST. (HTTPS of course). And how do you prevent blocking on sending analytics without making your users have to wait? By doing it asynchronously. Either by threading or a background working message queue.

Threading or a message queue

If you have a message queue configured and confident in its running, you should probably use that. But it adds a certain element of complexity. It makes your stack more complex because now you need to maintain a consumer(s) and the central message queue thing itself. What if you don't have a message queue all set up? Use Python threading.

To do the threading, which is hard, it's always a good idea to try to stand on the shoulder of giants. Or, if you can't find a giant, find something that is mature and proven to work well over time. We found that in Raven.

Raven is the Python library, or "agent", used for Sentry, the open source error tracking software. As you can tell by the name, Raven tries to be quite agnostic of Sentry the server component. Inside it, it has a couple of good libraries for making threaded jobs whose task is to make web requests. In particuarly, the awesome ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport. Using it basically looks like this:

import urlparse
from raven.transport.threaded_requests import ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport

transporter = ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport(
    urlparse.urlparse('https://ssl.google-analytics.com/collect'),
    timeout=5
)

params = {
    ...more about this later...
}

def success_cb():
    print "Yay!"

def failure_cb(exception):
    print "Boo :("

transporter.async_send(
    params,
    headers,
    success_cb,
    failure_cb
)

The call isn't very different from regular plain old requests.post.

About the parameters

This is probably the most exciting part and the place where you need some thought. It's non-trivial because you might need to put some careful thought into what you want to track.

Your friends is: This documentation page

There's also the Hit Builder tool where you can check that the values you are going to send make sense.

Some of the basic ones are easy:

"Protocol Version"

Just set to v=1

"Tracking ID"

That code thing you see in the regular chunk of JavaScript you put in the head, e.g tid=UA-1234-Z

"Data Source"

Optional word you call this type of traffic. We went with ds=api because we use it to measure the web API.

The user ones are a bit more tricky. Basically because you don't want to accidentally leak potentially sensitive information. We decided to keep this highly anonymized.

"Client ID"

A random UUID (version 4) number that identifies the user or the app. Not to be confused with "User ID" which is basically a string that identifies the user's session storage ID or something. Since in our case we don't have a user (unless they use an API token) we leave this to a new random UUID each time. E.g. cid=uuid.uuid4().hex This field is not optional.

"User ID"

Some string that identifies the user but doesn't reveal anything about the user. For example, we use the PostgreSQL primary key ID of the user as a string. It just means we can know if the same user make several API requests but we can never know who that user is. Google Analytics uses it to "lump" requests together. This field is optional.

Next we need to pass information about the hit and the "content". This is important. Especially the "Hit type" because this is where you make your manually server-side tracking act as if the user had clicked around on the website with a browser.

"Hit type"

Set this to t=pageview and it'll show up Google Analytics as if the user had just navigated to the URL in her browser. It's kinda weird to do this because clearly the user hasn't. Most likely she's used curl or something from the command line. So it's not really a pageview but, on our end, we have "views" in the webserver that produce information to the user. Some of it is HTML and some of it is JSON, in terms of output format, but either way they're sending us a URL and we respond with data.

"Document location URL"

The full absolute URL of that was used. E.g. https://www.example.com/page?foo=bar. So in our Django app we set this to dl=request.build_absolute_uri(). If you have a site where you might have multiple domains in use but want to collect them all under just 1 specific domain you need to set dh=example.com.

"Document Host Name" and "Document Path"

I actually don't know what the point of this is if you've already set the "Document location URL".

"Document Title"

In Google Analytics you can view your Content Drilldown by title instead of by URL path. In our case we set this to a string we know from the internal Python class that is used to make the API endpoint. dt='API (%s)'%api_model.__class__.__name__.

There are many more things you can set, such as the clients IP, the user agent, timings, exceptions. We chose to NOT include the user's IP. If people using the JavaScript version of Google Analytics can set their browser to NOT include the IP, we should respect that. Also, it's rarely interesting to see where the requests for a web API because it's often servers' curl or requests that makes the query, not the human.

Sample implementation

Going back to the code example mentioned above, let's demonstrate a fuller example:

import urlparse
from raven.transport.threaded_requests import ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport

transporter = ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport(
    urlparse.urlparse('https://ssl.google-analytics.com/collect'),
    timeout=5
)

# Remember, this is a Django, but you get the idea

domain = settings.GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_DOMAIN
if not domain or domain == 'auto':
    domain = RequestSite(request).domain

params = {
    'v': 1,
    'tid': settings.GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID,
    'dh': domain,
    't': 'pageview,
    'ds': 'api',
    'cid': uuid.uuid4().hext,
    'dp': request.path,
    'dl': request.build_request_uri(),
    'dt': 'API ({})'.format(model_class.__class__.__name__),
    'ua': request.META.get('HTTP_USER_AGENT'),
}

def success_cb():
    logger.info('Successfully informed Google Analytics (%s)', params)

def failure_cb(exception):
    logger.exception(exception)

transporter.async_send(
    params,
    headers,
    success_cb,
    failure_cb
)

How to unit test this

The class we're using, ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport has, as you might have seen, a method called async_send. There's also one, with the exact same signature, called sync_send which does the same thing but in a blocking fashion. So you could make your code look someting silly like this:

def send_tracking(page_title, request, async=True):
    # ...same as example above but wrapped in a function...
    function = async and transporter.async_send or transporter.sync_send
    function(
        params,
        headers,
        success_cb,
        failure_cb
    )

And then in your tests you pass in async=False instead.
But don't do that. The code shouldn't be sub-serviant to the tests (unless it's for the sake of splitting up monster-long functions).
Instead, I recommend you mock the inner workings of that ThreadedRequestsHTTPTransport class so you can make the whole operation synchronous. For example...

import mock
from django.test import TestCase
from django.test.client import RequestFactory

from where.you.have import pageview_tracking


class TestTracking(TestCase):

    @mock.patch('raven.transport.threaded_requests.AsyncWorker')
    @mock.patch('requests.post')
    def test_pageview_tracking(self, rpost, aw):

        def mocked_queue(function, data, headers, success_cb, failure_cb):
            function(data, headers, success_cb, failure_cb)

        aw().queue.side_effect = mocked_queue

        request = RequestFactory().get('/some/page')
        with self.settings(GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID='XYZ-123'):
            pageview_tracking('Test page', request)

            # Now we can assert that 'requests.post' was called.
            # Left as an exercise to the reader :)
            print rpost.mock_calls       

This is synchronous now and works great. It's not finished. You might want to write a side effect for the requests.post so you can have better control of that post. That'll also give you a chance to potentially NOT return a 200 OK and make sure that your failure_cb callback function gets called.

How to manually test this

One thing I was very curious about when I started was to see how it worked if you really ran this for reals but without polluting your real Google Analytics account. For that I built a second little web server on the side, whose address I used instead of https://ssl.google-analytics.com/collect. So, change your code so that https://ssl.google-analytics.com/collect is not hardcoded but a variable you can change locally. Change it to http://localhost:5000/ and start this little Flask server:

import time
import random
from flask import Flask, abort, request

app = Flask(__name__)
app.debug = True

@app.route("/", methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def hello():
    print "- " * 40
    print request.method, request.path
    print "ARGS:", request.args
    print "FORM:", request.form
    print "DATA:", repr(request.data)
    if request.args.get('sleep'):
        sec = int(request.args['sleep'])
        print "** Sleeping for", sec, "seconds"
        time.sleep(sec)
        print "** Done sleeping."
    if random.randint(1, 5) == 1:
        abort(500)
    elif random.randint(1, 5) == 1:
        # really get it stuck now
        time.sleep(20)
    return "OK"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

Now you get an insight into what gets posted and you can pretend that it's slow to respond. Also, you can get an insight into how your app behaves when this collection destination throws a 5xx error.

How to really test it

Google Analytics is tricky to test in that they collect all the stuff they collect then they take their time to process it and it then shows up the next day as stats. But, there's a hack! You can go into your Google Analytics account and click "Real-Time" -> "Overview" and you should see hits coming in as you're testing this. Obviously you don't want to do this on your real production account, but perhaps you have a stage/dev instance you can use. Or, just be patient :)

Last year I developed a web app called "Whatsdeployed". It's one of those rare one-afternoon-hacks that turns out to be really really useful. I use it every [work]day. And I've heard many people say they use it too.

At the time I built it, it only supported comparing multiple instance. E.g. a production and a dev site. Or a test, stage and production. But oftentimes, especially for smaller projects, you might only just have your one deployed site.

So I've now made it possible so you can compare just 1 site against your github.com master branch.

For example: whatsdeployed.io/s-Sir

Or whatsdeployed.io/s-J14

What these do, is simply comparing what git sha revision is deployed on those side-projects, compared to the latest git sha on the master branch on github.com.

Here's the final demo.

What I did was, I used the Bugzilla REST APIs to download all bugs for a specific product. Then I bulk-uploaded then to Autocompeter.com and lastly built a simply web front-end.

When you "download all" bugs with the Bugzilla REST API, it might be capped but I don't know what the limit is. The trick is to not download ALL bugs for the product in one big fat query, but to find out what all components are for that product and then download for each. The Python code is here.

Everyone's Invited to Play

So first you need to sign in on https://autocompeter.com using your GitHub account. Then you can generate a Auth-Key by picking a domain. The domain can be anything really. I picked bugzilla.mozilla.org but you can use whatever you like.

Then, when you have an Auth-Key you need to know the name of the product (or products) and run the script like this:

python download.py 7U4eFYH5cqR15m3ekuxkzaUR Socorro

Once you've done that, fork my codepen and replace the domain and any other references to the product.

Caveats

To make this really useful, you'd have to run it more often. Perhaps you can hook it up to a cron job or something and make it so that you only download, from the REST API, things that have changed since the last time you did a big download. Then you can let the cron job run frequently.

If you want really hot results, you could hook up a server-side service that consumes the Bugzfeed websocket.

Last but not least; this will never list private/secure bugs. Only publically available stuff.

The Future

If people enjoy it perhaps we can change the front-end demo so it's not hardcoded to one specific product ("Socorro" in my case). And it can be made pretty.

And the data would need to be downloaded and re-submitted more frequently. A quick Heroku app mayhaps?

Whatsdeployed was a tool I developed for my work at Mozilla. I think many other organizations can benefit from using it too.

So, on many sites, what we do when deploying a site, is that we note which git sha was used and write that to a file which is then exposed via the web server. Like this for example. If you know that sha and what's at the tip of the master branch on the project's GitHub page, you can build up an interesting dashboard that allows you to see what's available and what's been deployed.

The other really useful case is when you have more than just one environment. For example, you might have a dev, stage and prod environment and, always lastly, the master branch on GitHub. Now you can see what code has been shipped on prod versus your staging environment for example.

This is one of those far too few projects that you build quickly one Friday afternoon and it turns out to be surprisingly useful to a lot of people. I for one, check various projects like this several times per day.

The code is on GitHub and it's basically a tiny bit of Flask with some jQuery doing a couple of AJAX requests. If you enjoy it and use it, please share.

UPDATE

Blogged about a facelift, Jan 2018