pboyd / flightranker-backend

flightranker-backend is the back-end code for flightranker.com. This was largely an experiment in software organization, so there are actually three back-ends:

• backendA - a flat structure without much attention paid to writing good code
• backendB - a hierarchical structure where each dependency is isolated
• backendC - based on ideas from John Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design

All three are functionally identical. You can read more about it on my blog.

Set up

Database

You will need to set up and populate a MySQL database before running either backend. For local development, try:

docker run -d -p 3306:3306 --name=flightdb -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=flightdb -e MYSQL_USER=flightdb -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=flightdb -e MYSQL_DATABASE=flightdb mysql/mysql-server:5.7

The files in the sql directory will set up the schema and populate the airports and carriers tables:

cat sql/*.sql | mysql -uflightdb -pflightdb -h 127.0.0.1 flightdb

The load program will populate the flights table. See load/README.md for details. The test data was generated from a database loaded with only the following months:

• January 2019
• February 2019
• March 2019

After the data has been loaded, run the SQL files in sql/updates:

cat sql/updates/*.sql | mysql -uflightdb -pflightdb -h 127.0.0.1 flightdb

Configuration

All configuration is read from environment variables, each backend reads the following:

• MYSQL_ADDRESS: Network address for the database (e.g. 127.0.0.1:3306)
• MYSQL_DATABASE: Database name
• MYSQL_USER: Username for MySQL
• MYSQL_PASS: Password for MySQL
• CORS_ALLOW_ORIGIN: Value to return in the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. If this variable is not set, the header is omitted.

Running

Each backend can be run in the usual Go way:

cd backendA && go install && backendA

cd backendB && go install && backendB

cd backendC && go install && backendC

Tests

Database tests in all the backends require the same set of environment variables as the backend server.

MYSQL_USER=flightdb MYSQL_PASS=flightdb MYSQL_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1:3306 MYSQL_DATABASE=flightdb go test ./...

Docker

There is a Dockerfile in root of the repository that can be used for either backend.

For backendA:

docker build . -t flightranker-backend-a --build-arg which=backendA

For backendB:

docker build . -t flightranker-backend-b --build-arg which=backendB

For backendC:

docker build . -t flightranker-backend-c --build-arg which=backendC

Credits

On-Time performance data are provided by the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The list of airports was taken from stat-computing.org.