tribune-pollster

A serverless API for storing user responses to poll questions.

Built with Chalice to run on AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway.

This should be considered alpha-quality software. The API and implementation approach is not stable by any means.

Assumptions

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) account (AWS)
• AWS access keypair
• Python 2.7 (this is a requirement of Lambda)
• virtualenvwrapper

Installation

Create a virtualenv:

mkvirtualenv tribune-pollster

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/newsapps/tribune-pollster.git

Deployment

Deployment is handled through the Chalice framework.

To reuse this outside of the Chicago Tribune, you'll likely have to create a Lambda function in the AWS console or through the AWS API and then edit .chalice/config.json to replace the lambda_arn value with the ARN of your function.

Then, deploy using the chalice command:

chalice deploy

The current version uses AWS SimpleDB as the data store. This decision was made to avoid the complexity of deploying the psycopg2 package on AWS Lambda. In order to use SimpleDB, you'll need to create a SimpleDB "domain" named pollster-responses. You can do this with the create_simpledb_domain.py script:

./create_simpledb_domain.py

Public API

Create a response to a question

POST /polls/<poll-id>/questions/<question-id>/responses

Required parameters:

• poll_id
• question_id
• user_id
• value

Example payload:

{
    "user_id": "test",
    "value": "meh"
}

Example request:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"user_id":"test","value":"lame"}' https://2dpij75av9.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/polls/lollapalooza-anniversary/questions/1991/responses

Example response:

{"responses": [{"question_id": "1991", "user_id": "test", "value": "lame", "poll_id": "lollapalooza-anniversary", "answer_id": "499e628f-af11-4f5b-b0d5-b2b244bf7579"}]}

Get all responses to a question

GET /polls/<poll-id>/questions/<question-id>/responses

Required parameters:

• poll_id
• question_id

Example request:

curl https://2dpij75av9.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/polls/lollapalooza-anniversary/questions/1991/responses

Example response:

{"responses": [{"answer_id": "test-lollapalooza-anniversary-1991", "user_id": "test", "value": "lame", "poll_id": "lollapalooza-anniversary", "question_id": "1991"}, {"answer_id": "183b6640-e500-4c89-81b9-213d8ccaa4e4", "user_id": "test", "value": "lame", "poll_id": "lollapalooza-anniversary", "question_id": "1991"}, {"answer_id": "499e628f-af11-4f5b-b0d5-b2b244bf7579", "user_id": "test", "value": "lame", "poll_id": "lollapalooza-anniversary", "question_id": "1991"}]}

Get a summary of responses to a question

GET /polls/<poll-id>/questions/<question-id>/summary

Gets the number of responses, by response value.

Required parameters:

• poll_id
• question_id

Example request:

curl https://2dpus-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/polls/lollapalooza-anniversary/questions/1991/summary

Example response:

{"summary": {"__total__": 3, "lame": 3}, "poll_id": "lollapalooza-anniversary", "question_id": "1991"}

Authors

• Geoff Hing [email protected] for the Chicago Tribune DataViz team