changelogs.md

This is an open source application designed to showcase the usage of modern serverless compute platforms such as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. It is built and deployed using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

This application is a Github changelog crawler and parser. It follows the NPM, PyPI, and RubyGems package registries to watch for newly published code, then checks the Github for each package for changelog files, parses the file, and then exposes both a human readable HTML and machine readable JSON file with the changelog content.

For a full explanation of this architecture see the /docs folder

Development Environment

This application is coded, built, and deployed using node.js. You will need to ensure that Node 9.0.0+ is installed on your local machine.

Additionally Docker is used for building the images that get run in AWS Fargate.

In order to deploy the application you need to first setup the development environment with all the dependencies:

npm run-script setup

This will install the right version of the AWS CDK locally to this project, as well as all the CDK dependencies necessary to construct the application. It will also install the NPM dependencies that the application needs at runtime. The next step is to deploy the app onto your AWS account:

npm run-script deploy

Deploying from scratch typically takes around 30 minutes (most of which is spent on a CloudFront distribution rollout). While you wait you can check out the CDK app that defines all the infrastructure.

If you want to see ahead of time what CloudFormation templates will be deployed then run:

npm run-script synth

Then check the contents of the /synth folder that is generated. You will find several thousands lines of generated CloudFormation template defining the underlying resources of the application stack.

If you want to change part of the application and redeploy just that part you can do so with a command like:

./node_modules/.bin/cdk deploy crawler

Github Access Token

This application uses the Github API to discover changelogs in repositories. For a less limited Github API access you need to configure an access token:

1. Generate a Github access token for yourself: https://github.com/settings/tokens
2. Put the token in to /secrets/github-access-token.json:

{
  "token": "<your personal access token>"
}

Domain name and SSL

You will need to supply you own domain name and SSL cert if you want to deploy the site. The configuration should be put in a file settings.json in the root of the repo:

{
  "names": [
    "<your (sub)domain name"
  ],
  "acmCertRef": "<your cert arn>"
}

Cleanup

To destroy any resources you have created for this example:

npm run-script destroy

License Summary

This sample code is made available under a modified MIT license. See the LICENSE file.