update-countdown

updatecountdown.com

What?

This website is a complicated and not-so-funny joke about how the game, BattleBit Remastered, has not been updated in over a year and a half despite promises. More info about this be found at https://updatecountdown.com/battlebit#info.

Building

Requirements

• cargo - Rust package manager
• esbuild - an extremely fast bundler for the web
• minify - Go minifiers for web formats
• TimeScaleDB - time-series database packaged as a Postgres extension
• upx (optional) - executable file compressor

Linux

With upx (compresses binary size):

sh build.sh

Or, without upx:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release

NixOS

nix develop .#build -c $SHELL
sh build.sh

Windows

cargo build --release

Setup / Running

1. Have a PostgreSQL server running with TimeScaleDB installed. Either self-hosted or using TigerData.

2. To set the connection parameters, you can set the PostgreSQL environment variables as needed. (e.g. PGHOST, PGPORT, PGDATABASE, PGUSER, PGPASSWORD)

3. Copy the save-EXAMPLE.json file to create a save.json file and modify the datetime as you like. Note that multiple entries/pages is not yet supported.

4. Build the project and run the binary:

./target/release/update-countdown

Todo

• Make collecting time series data optional (i.e. place behind a feature flag)
• Add Docker/Containerization support
• Add other game pages (e.g. Battlefront II, Silksong, Half-Life 3)
• Add home & statistics page
• Config file to change settings (e.g. port, DB URL)
• Save page state to DB (overkill maybe?)

Tech stack

• Frontend: HTML + Askama, CSS, JS (with JSDoc)
• Bundler: esbuild, minify
• Backend: axum
• Database: PostgreSQL with TimeScaleDB (for collecting time series data)

Motivation: Simple, fast, memory efficient, few dependencies