Show HN: Textdb.dev – simple data sharing for fun projects

by bontaq • 6 years ago

200 77 6 years ago

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Made because I couldn't find a simple, no-sign-up service to sync a list of names for a command line tool. And resubmitted because yesterday I goofed and the curl commands listed didn't point to the right location, which really took the fun out of it.

Favorite part of the project: trying out Phoenix's built in pub sub + live view (the live view subscribes to a data/:id topic, which the api write endpoint publishes to) to get that nice instant update on write if you have the data open in the browser without polling.

It's also fun to see how fast it syncs multiple browser windows watching the same data when you edit it in one window. That's not useful, but I give it 1 "neat".

chris_st• 6 years ago

That's pretty cool! Are you doing anything like rate-limiting to prevent abuse?

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Thanks 8), rate limiting is just the most basic of nginx configs to like, 10 requests / second / ip

nickjj• 6 years ago

Hey, if you ever wanted to come on my podcast to talk about your tech stack (how it was developed, deployed, lessons learned, etc.) I'd love to have you on.

There's a few Phoenix episodes out currently, but none are using Live View yet. It would be really fun to talk about how someone is using it in production.

If you do, head over to https://runninginproduction.com/ and click the "become a guest" button on the top right to get the ball rolling.

berkas1• 6 years ago

Hi, is the source code available? :)

BTW, the front page's HTML seems to have a <head> and <body> inside another <body>.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Sure, I just made it public over here: https://github.com/bontaq/textdb

Yeah I'm not sure why it's doing that, v annoying though

cocktailpeanuts• 6 years ago

probably you have a layout bug. it's wrapping a layout within a layout.

spery• 6 years ago

Manually editing data has a bug. If you click cancel it will still update the value.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Thank you, fixed

josefrichter2• 6 years ago

Whoever made this, I love you. I do a lot of prototyping in Framer, and this just make simple prototypes that communicate with one another hell of a lot easier!

StavrosK2• 6 years ago

You may also like this super simple MQ I wrote a while ago:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/messaging-for-your-things/

canada_dry• 6 years ago

A handy substitute for mqtt since it doesn't allow a simple http get/post method to set and query keys - something very useful with iot stuff!

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Hell yeah, I'm planning to keep it up for a good while and lemme know if something isn't working or you'd like a new feature. bontaq @ the google mail .com

mhass• 6 years ago

Very cool. Are you using just cowboy as a server or do you have nginx/Apache in front?

bontaq21• 6 years ago

nginx is in front, but it's just doing a proxy and setting some headers, so effectively cowboy's serving everything.

So far it's doing a great job too, CPU is at 2%, 1Gb free ram of the 4Gb available, and a pretty constant 1Mbps outward, on the 20$/m digital ocean droplet. I may have jinxed it by saying this though.

WrtCdEvrydy• 6 years ago

This is fancy...

rendall2• 6 years ago

Is there a maximum file size limit?

rendall2• 6 years ago

This was answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23949917

"There currently isn't, but it is intended for small amounts of data. Today or tomorrow I'll probably put a cap at 500Kb or so, which is still a heckload of data."

known• 6 years ago

Similar service https://u.instacrypt.me/

mkoryak2• 6 years ago

No, it's not.

Your link is a message service that self destructs.

OPs link is a storage service

mkoryak2• 6 years ago

Can you add a link to your GitHub from the website?

I usually star things instead of bookmarking and others probably do too.

NetOpWibby2• 6 years ago

https://github.com/bontaq/textdb

unixfox• 6 years ago

Alternative service except there is no live update: https://jsonbox.io/

gmemstr• 6 years ago

Is there an upper limit to the amount of data that can be stored on an endpoint?

bontaq21• 6 years ago

There currently isn't, but it is intended for small amounts of data. Today or tomorrow I'll probably put a cap at 500Kb or so, which is still a heckload of data.

ximm2• 6 years ago

The HTML of the frontend is messed up (<head> is duplicated)

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Should be fixed now 8)

ximm2• 6 years ago

This seems to be in a similar spirit to https://patchbay.pub/.

I love these small services, but I still don't have an idea how they can be scaled up: If you want to use them for anything serious you probably have to prevent abuse and comply to all kinds of regulations.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Yeah they're nice and fun to build. I imagine if you wanted to, you'd run this behind a VPN at #corporation, which will be a huge pain to get approval for, but not that bad.

anderspitman2• 6 years ago

I didn't design patchbay to scale. I think of it more as a hammer, or maybe a Swiss army knife. Things can be useful without scaling.

miki123211• 6 years ago

It would be cool if it was possible to read the data not just by the ID, but also by the hash of the ID.

That would let us serve stuff like version information and links to the latest version, without the fear that somebody is going to reverse engineer our app and replace the data with something malicious.

We, as the app author, would have the full key, so we could read and write, whereas users would have nothing but the hash.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

That's a cool idea, I'd definitely like to add the ability to create a little store with more safety, and that totally works with the goal of simplicity. I'll give it a shot.

TedDoesntTalk4• 6 years ago

It's a cool idea, but the old anti-pattern about security through obscurity applies.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

It is done, lmk if it works alright. The read only hashes should be visible beneath the data editing view on a new one.

ASVVVAD3• 6 years ago

Adding it to the homepage would be cool too ^^

TedDoesntTalk4• 6 years ago

What language is this? I visited https://www.phoenixframework.org/ and even watched a few minutes of a video but there's no mention of the programming language. I suppose the language is called Phoenix?

detaro2• 6 years ago

It's Elixir.

TedDoesntTalk4• 6 years ago

huh. I would have thought https://www.phoenixframework.org/ would mention Elixir then.

dmitriid• 6 years ago

Elixir (on top if Erlang VM)

- https://elixir-lang.org/

- https://www.erlang.org/

webmaven2• 6 years ago

Very cool! Do you have any sort of dashboard displaying stats for the service? Simple totals would be interesting, of course (size, # of buckets, # of edits, etc.), but I'd find histograms of edits etc. per bucket particularly fascinating.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

I don't yet, but let me get back to you in a couple days. I think it'd be interesting to all.

webmaven2• 6 years ago

ping

redm• 6 years ago

I really like simple tools like this. Well done; I can see lots of uses for this, especially with the Serverless/Jamstack surge.

I love the idea of Hashing and read/write keys mentioned in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=miki123211

I also like the idea of batch requests so you can pul multiple keys at once, or set multiple keys at once. It seems better for everyone.

My only concern is that a small portion of users will undoubtedly try to abuse this with high volumes or large objects, or both.

Have you published any limits on value key size, value size, read/write limits for keys etc? It might be worth thinking about now before you have to shutdown users or shutdown the service due to cost.

Congrats again!

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Thanks! So far the limits are about 500Kb, which is more than enough for what this service is intended for.

The setting of multiple keys I'd have to think about, as it's already so easy to acquire multiple keys -- ie I don't think I'd be saving or making anything much faster by special handling for it. Pulling multiple keys is likewise, you're free to do it in an async all.

erezsh• 6 years ago

Cool idea, nice implementation. But man, fix your README.md!

jrott• 6 years ago

Thank you for making this it's super handy.

bontaq21• 6 years ago

I see some of you are realizing that I haven't enforced any data url to be a UUID, good on you. I hope it opens up new neat things like https://textdb.dev/data/hello-hackernews or more creative ideas.

ASVVVAD3• 6 years ago

That's awesome! I was wondering if I had to go to https://textdb.dev using the browser to get an ID x)

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Nah it just gives you a more secret id, I'm happy to support people talking about apples at https://textdb.dev/data/apples

WA• 6 years ago

What’s the purpose of the read-only link if it has the same UUID?

bontaq21• 6 years ago

I just built it without a backfill, new data should have a full read-only hash -- I'll try to backfill the data tomorrow

tannercollin• 6 years ago

Great work! I wrote something similar at:

https://reg.t0.vc

It's useful if you set up bash aliases like "push" and "pull" so you can quickly move snippets of text across servers.

abathur• 6 years ago

I'd already been pondering the paperclip-machine universe that could be created by a Twitter bot that just pipes tweets to bash and posts the output.

Now it could just trawl Twitter for addresses at https://textdb.dev, and throw the contents through bash, post the result back to textdb, and tweet a new link... :]

bontaq21• 6 years ago

That's a neat idea too, I love hearing all these new ways to use a simple bit of data.

lou1306• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure you could build a Turing machine with textdb as tape and a Twitter bot as the tape head.

josefrichter2• 6 years ago

One more question: Does the data expire?

bontaq21• 6 years ago

Nope, especially seeing the current usage / data size I think it's perfectly fine to hang around forever. I may eventually implement something to clean up data with no reads for > 1 month, but again so far it looks fine to leave things around.

jwarren• 6 years ago

I think this is really nice and smart. I would suggest left-aligning the text in the edit/view mode for a few reasons:

1) It's a bit easier to read for longer text sources 2) It makes writing/reading JSON/YAML/other data sources much easier 3) lists are much easier to parse

bontaq21• 6 years ago

I have added an option in the data view to customize text alignment, thanks for the good idea

Show HN: Textdb.dev – simple data sharing for fun projects

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