Introduction

Originally all of the web-app frameworky garbage in this app was custom from the ground up, but all of that has been spun-off into 38-Moths. OlegDB is also required. Also PostgreSQL. mzbh's job is pretty simple: Collect and host .webm files. It was built with the following goals in mind:

• No dependencies (other than files I can embed into the project directly)
• Should be able to run indefinitely (no memory leaks)
• Should be pretty fast
• Should be able to run on a cheapo, $5.00 a month 32-bit VPS with no issues.
• Should be fault tolerant and fall-back to different failure modes

Webserver

The webserver is something of my own design because I hate dependencies. It's not great but it'll get the job done. You can run just the webserver with:

./mzbh

This runs the webserver by itself.

The webserver also accepts a thread counter argument, -t. This specifies the number of threads in the acceptor pool.

./mzbh -t 4

This runs the webserver with 4 threads. The default is 2.

Scraper

The scraper hits the 4chan API very slowly and fetches threads it thinks will have .webms in them. It then downloads the .webm and thumbnails for said .webm. These are stuck in the WFU_WEBMS_DIR location, organized by board.

The goal is to retain as much metadata as possible while still allowing the files to exist in a pure state (no hash filenames, not embedded in a database somewhere.)

You can run this with:

./downloader

Installation

You'll need both libcurl and libvpx for downloading things and thumbnailing webms.

1. make

There is no installation. this will just build a handful of binaries you can use.

• downloader - The scraper/downloader thing. Responsible for hitting the API, downloading and writing files.
• mzbh - The main webserver/application and scraper. This is the meat of everything.
• dbctl - Handy cli program to manage and inspect the DB state.
• greshunkel_test - Tests for the GRESHUNKEL templating language.
• unit_test - Random unit tests. Not really organized, mostly to prevent regressions.

Running

Web server

You can either run the main binary inside of Docker (bootstrap.sh is handy for this), inside a Vagrant VM, or you can just run the binary raw. There are a handful of environment variables you can set to affect where the program will keep files:

• WFU_WEBMS_DIR - Location to store webm files. Defaults to ./webms/

Database

You'll need to download and install OlegDB. mzbh by default expects the database to be running on localhost:38080. Just make sure this is the case. I'm moving this over to PostgreSQL so you'll need that, too.

Running Raw

After compiling with make, just run the created binary:

./mzbh

This will run the web app frontend along with the scraper.