Nextstrain status pages

Source code for producing high-level status pages of Nextstrain's operations at https://status.nextstrain.org.

• Accesses data from GitHub's API via Steampipe SQL queries
• Generates static HTML pages from the queried data
• Progressively enhances the pages with a dusting of client-side JS
• Updates every 5 minutes using GitHub Actions
• Publishes via GitHub Pages

Development

Rebuild the status site by running:

make

Output will be under build/. Open an HTML page in your browser to view it:

open build/pathogen-workflows.html

Requirements:

• Node.js (at least 16, higher probably works too)
• Steampipe CLI
• net plugin for Steampipe: steampipe plugin install net
• github plugin for Steampipe: steampipe plugin install github && make -C steampipe-plugins/github
• GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable to be set, e.g. using GITHUB_TOKEN=$(gh auth token)
• GNU Make
• PostgreSQL psql client (no server components necessary)

If you're just hacking on the HTML/CSS/JS of the status page and not the data generation for it, then you can avoid the Steampipe requirement by running:

make download

before make to fetch data from the status website instead of regenerating it locally.

Why this and not that?

Why static generation? It's simple, robust, easy to host, and fast to load. We don't need complex status pages.

Why Steampipe? Why not query the GitHub API directly? Gathering the data we need from the API directly would involve sending many requests to many endpoints, pagination of results, manual joining of records, and many other boring data tasks. Steampipe either takes care of these for us or they're tasks which are easily done in SQL. SQL is a great fit for expressing the data we need. Steampipe's not perfect, but it made starting out very easy. If at some point we find it too lacking we can switch to another approach. The separation of data generation from data presentation is nice as it does allow for other generation approaches without affecting presentation.

What might be an alternate approach? GitHub workflow_run webhooks received by a tiny app on Heroku (or Fly.io/Netlify/Render/whatever) that records the webhook payloads in a local database (e.g. SQLite or maybe PostgreSQL). Dynamically rendered status pages. This provides very up-to-date information without polling, though introduces significant possibility for error/inconsistency due to missed webhook deliveries and drift. So we'd probably want to supplement the webhook data with regularly polls for new data, e.g. by querying Steampipe and backfilling the local database where necessary such that we're eventually consistent.