Death Notifier

Get notified when a famous person dies.

Wikipedia's editors are known for updating pages as soon as someone has died. Why not turn that into a service? This tool regularly checks if people are still alive according to Wikipedia, and emails you as soon as that changes.

Development

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+ (i.e. apt install php php-cgi)
  • PHP cURL (i.e. apt install php-curl)
  • PHP DOM (i.e. apt install php-dom)
  • PHP SQLite 3 (i.e. apt install php-sqlite3)
• composer (make sure composer.phar is on your path)
• npm

Setting up

Install the dependencies. Run this after cloning the repo, and each time after pulling new commits.

composer.phar install
npm ci

Building

• Build the tool in dist/ for development

  npm run dev
  

• Same as above, but automatically rebuild whenever source code is changed

  npm run dev:server
  

• Build the tool in dist/ for deployment

  npm run deploy
  

Pre-commit

If you changed the version number or updated any dependencies, update the lock files:

composer.phar update
npm install

Static analysis

• Run static analysis

  npm run analyze
  

• Run all tests

  npm run test
  

• Run all tests in package

  npm run test -- --test-target=com/fwdekker/deathnotifier/wikipedia/
  

• Run static analysis and tests

  npm run check
  

Deployment

Build

Build the software and move it to the right directory.

npm run deploy
mv dist/ /var/www/death-notifier/

Configuration

Inside the installation directory, create config.ini.php and use it to override values from config.default.ini.php. Make sure only the user that runs PHP can read/write config.ini.php.

Cron jobs

You should run the process-email-queue and update-all-trackings actions regularly; recommended is every minute and every five minutes, respectively. For example, you can add the following lines to your crontab (e.g. using sudo -u www crontab -e):

* * * * * cd /var/www/death-notifier && php /var/www/death-notifier/api.php action=process-email-queue password=secret_password
*/5 * * * * cd /var/www/death-notifier && php /var/www/death-notifier/api.php action=update-all-trackings password=secret_password

Replace secret_password with the password you configured in config.ini.php.

Logs

It is recommended to also use a tool such as newsyslog to manage log rotation. For example, create the file /etc/newsyslog.conf.d/death-notifier.conf with the following contents:

/var/www/death-notifier/.death-notifier.log    www:www 600 7 * @T00   JE
/var/www/death-notifier/.death-notifier.db.log www:www 600 7 * $W0D23 JpE

Initialize

Open index.html in an interactive browser to initialize the database. Make sure only the user that runs PHP can read/write .death-notifier.db.

Inspection

You can use a tool such as VisiData to manually inspect the database contents on the command line.