Run Backstage

Backstage is a pretty full-featured, web-based front-end to Mastoscore functions. It breaks down the activities required to do a run into web pages that provide some immediate feedback.

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Quick Start

All commands expect to run in the project root directory:

./scripts/backstage.sh

The backstage.sh will ensure that Python dependencies and NodeJS dependencies are installed. It implicitly invokes nvm.sh because that's what I use.

It will try to launch on port 5173. If you do a lot of React and vite development, that port might already be taken. Vite will choose another number, so watch. Sometimes it launches on 5174 because I already have something running on 5173. Open your browser to http://localhost:5173. DO NOT OPEN THIS UP TO THE INTERNET: it is not hardened in any way. If this was visible on the internet, it would be wrecked in about 5 seconds.

General Flow

  1. Set up a config. I usually find a config I already have, hit the copy button, and then fill in the details.
  2. Run the fetch. thumbnail. This tends to take a while. A small run will be 2-5 minutes. Big runs, like Monsterdon, routinely take an hour. Note that it does some number of parallel fetches. That's controllable in the ini file.
  3. Run the analysis. This will tell you the basics of what we discovered. Make sure it looks reasonable.
  4. Generate the histogram. Make sure it looks reasonable. This is usually where I discover something has gone wrong with the fetch or the analysis. One time I found that an Akkoma server somehow appeared to supply 1400 posts, and they were all timestamped at weird times. Obviously my fetching does something wrong with the data.
  5. Generate the wordcloud. This is an iterative process. Look at the wordcloud. Look at the words that are big and the text will tell you the top 10 words. I usually edit the stop words, update, and then regenerate.
  6. Go to the blog page. Search for a thumbnail and select it. Then generate the page. I have a separate process for publishing the web page and I usually do it first, so that the web site is right before the posts go out.
  7. Finally, post everything. Then click the links to the post so that you can see whether they look right.

Backend API

The module provides an HTTP, job-like interface to the mastoscore functionality. See the general documentation and the detailed documentation on it.

tmux Session

This will open a full-screen window with 2 panes. screenshot of back-end terminal window