A2RB Count Proxy

Forked and built from the Alfa Jango Count Proxy.

This application grabs Meetup info from the Meetup API for the Ann Arbor Ruby Brigade group, and stores it in a static JSONP file on Amazon S3 to be embedded directly in a2rb.org.

Process

This script runs a few times a day to update the Meetup group info.

It will loop through each event, with a slight delay to ease load on the vendor servers. For each event, it will grab the event name, description, date, location, and number of people registered.

The script will then write the info for all events to a JavaScript JSONP string and store it as a file on Amazon S3.

Writing to jsonp will eliminate cross-domain concerns inherent in loading JSON data from S3.

File format

Example file format for the json file stored on Amazon S3:

setJSON({
  Ann-Arbor-Ruby: {
    events: [
      {
        name: "Event Name",
        description: "<p>Event description</p>",
        time: 1412118000000,
        status: "upcoming",
        venue: {
          name: "Venue Name",
          address_1: "Address 1",
          address_2: "Address 2",
          city: "Ann Arbor",
          state: "MI",
          zip: "48105"
        }
        yes_rsvp_count: 56,
        maybe_rsvp_count: 2,
        headcount: 0,
        event_url: "http://www.meetup.com/Ann-Arbor-Ruby/events/203156012/",
        ...
      }
    ]
  }
});

Running script

First, update the top of the script with the settings for the Meetup group and and Meetup API credentials to import, as well as with your own S3 bucket name and desired filenames.

To run the script, make sure it's executable:

sudo chmod u+x bin/get_counts

Then run it, be sure that your MEETUP_API_KEY, AWS_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_SECRET_KEY variables are present in your environment:

MEETUP_API_KEY=YOUR_MEETUP_API_KEY_HERE AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_HERE AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE bin/get_events

Setting up on Heroku

You'll want to put the script somewhere on a server (or just set it up locally), so that it can run on a scheduled cron job to update the download counts and rewrite the file on S3.

The easiest place to deploy this script to is probably Heroku.

Just clone this repo from Github, and create a new app on Heroku's Cedar stack with the heroku gem:

heroku apps:create my-meetup-proxy
git push heroku

Then add your Amazon Web Services access key and secret key to Heroku's environment config for the app:

heroku config:add MEETUP_API_KEY=YOUR_MEETUP_API_KEY_HERE AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_HERE AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE

To test the script on heroku:

heroku run get_events

Now, let's setup Heroku's "scheduler" addon (previously called the "cron" addon):

heroku addons:add scheduler:standard

And set it up to run however often we'd like:

heroku addons:open scheduler

The above will open the Heroku scheduler dashboard in your browser, where you can click "Add job...", type in get_events, and select your frequency (probably daily, or at most hourly, if possible, to minimize impact on venders' available API resources).