sharknado

sharknado is a super simple and super fast messaging server for the Internet of Things built with tornado and mongodb, inspired by dweet.io, compatible with python 2.7, 3.2+ and pypy

It implements HAPI standards to provide web-based APIs that are machine ready but human/developer friendly.

usage

Install the dependencies with pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

launch the server:

python sharknado.py [OPTIONS]

options:

• port binds the server to the given port. default 8000
• processes number of processes to fork, 1: no child processes forked, 0: n_cpus processes, n: n processes. default 1
• mongo_uri mongodb url. default mongodb://localhost:27017/sharknado
• messages_expire expiration of messages, in seconds, 0 to disable expiration. default 1 month
• cors_origin Access-Control-Allow-Origin header content. default "*", set to "" to disable cors

tests

you can run the test suite using the tornado test runner:

python -m tornado.testing tests.test_sharknado

you can also use your preferred runner :)

hapi interface

send messages

to send a message, just call a URL:

send/message/for/my-thing-name?hello=world&foo=bar

Any query parameters you add to the request will be added as key-value pairs to the content of the message. You can also send any valid JSON data in the body of the request with a POST.

sharknado will respond with

{
  "this": "succeeded",
  "by": "sending",
  "the": "message",
  "with": {
    "_id": "5452180080cd99000268e0cb",
    "thing": "my-thing-name",
    "created": "2014-10-30T10:50:40.220000",
    "content": {
      "hello": "world",
      "foo": "bar"
    }
  }
}

retrieve messages

to retrieve messages, call the URL:

get/messages/for/my-thing-name

sharknado will respond with

{
  "this": "succeeded",
  "by": "getting",
  "the": "messages",
  "with": [
    {
      "_id": "5452180080cd99000268e0cf",
      "thing": "my-thing-name",
      "created": "2014-10-30T10:50:47.220000",
      "content": {
        "this": "is cool!"
      }
    },
    {
      "_id": "5452180080cd99000268e0cb",
      "thing": "my-thing-name",
      "created": "2014-10-30T10:50:40.220000",
      "content": {
        "hello": "world",
        "foo": "bar"
      }
    }
  ]
}

by default sharknado will return messages from the past 30 days, you can override this behaviour by calling the url

get/messages/for/my-thing-name/past/n-days

you can also retrieve only the latest message

/get/latest/message/for/my-thing-name

count messages

sharknado provides a fast message counter endpoint

/count/messages/for/my-thing-name

todo list

in no particular order:

• message streaming
• message locking
• mongodb write concern customization
• support for python 3