Demo: pywright.fly.dev

What is Playwright?

Playwright is a browser automation library from Microsoft. It can be used to automate tasks in the browser, for testing purpose.

But we can use it to scrape data from websites that use javascript to render the content.

Think about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. They use javascript to render the content. So we can't scrape them with normal tools like requests or scrapy.

Selenium is a popular tool for scraping javascript websites. It's powerful, have a lot of features, but it's slow and hard to use.

Playwright is a newplayer in this field. It's fast, have excelent simple API.

What is Pywright?

Pywright is a API service writen in python that use Playwright to render javascript websites. You can easily deploy it to any cloud provider then use it as a service.

Install Pywright

I've created a docker image for Playwright. It's contain …

What is "The Lounge"?

"The Lounge" is a self-hosted web IRC client. It's a fork of Shout, which is no longer maintained. The Lounge is actively maintained and has a lot of features.

Screen shot:

Website:

https://thelounge.chat/

Deploy on Fly.io

Follow these steps to deploy "The Lounge" on Fly.io:

1. Create Dockerfile

FROM thelounge/thelounge:latest

EXPOSE 9000

2. Create new Fly.io app

Run fly launch and follow the instruction. You can choose any name and server region you want.

Or you can copy this fly.toml file (replace <app-name> with your app name):

# fly.toml file generated for iirc on 2022-11-17T21:46:27+07:00

app = "<app-name>"
kill_signal = "SIGINT"
kill_timeout = 5
processes = []

[env]

[experimental]
  allowed_public_ports = []
  auto_rollback = true

[mounts]
source="ircdata"
destination="/var/opt/thelounge"

[[services]]
  http_checks = []
  internal_port = 9000
  processes = ["app"]
  protocol = "tcp"
  script_checks = []
  [services.concurrency]
    hard_limit = 25
    soft_limit = 20
    type = "connections"

  [[services.ports]]
    force_https …

Fly.io - A review

After a month trying Fly.io, I must say that:

Fly.io is awesome!.

After a year using Hosthatch, I tired of their terrible uptime, sometime the servers is down for 2 days. I'm not sure why, but I'm sure that I'm not going back to them.

Luckily, I've found Fly.io. It's cheap, fast and reliable. I'm moving all my services to Fly.io. And to be honest, it's so easy that make me feel like I'm cheating.

Guide to migrate

If you have a Dockerfile for your service, you can migrate to Fly.io in 5 minutes.

Here are some examples.

Vaultwarden (No Postgres, No Redis)

Create Dockerfile

FROM vaultwarden/server:latest

Launch a new app

Run fly launch and follow the instruction. You can choose any name and server region you want.

After deployed, you can access at <app-name>.fly.dev.

Create new …