mta-status

mtaStatus is a REST API that returns MTA subway status in Json format.

It is written in Rust for all the wonderful reasons, but most importantly the fact that it results in a tiny service. The tiny runtime cost really shines when you deploy it on a raspberryPi, which has become my main source for testing and personal projects.

Why

The MTA is necessary if you live in NYC. It is also highly unreliable :| For this reason we need to keep an eye on which trains are running (especially for those early morning commutes).

Now you have the option of using the wonderful widget that is provided by the MTA: http://www.mta.info/mta-service-status-widget
Or maybe we like to view the status on our phones and the lack of a mobile site is annoying, so we look for an api: http://web.mta.info/status/serviceStatus.txt
YES that is XML!! But wait is that HTML embedded inside the XML?? YES!

Therefore the nice Json API.

Build

Build for Raspi:

Source https://github.com/Ragnaroek/rust-on-raspberry-docker

Run from the root project dir:

docker run \
    --volume $PWD:/home/cross/project \
    --volume ~/.cargo/registry:/home/cross/.cargo/registry \
    ragnaroek/rust-raspberry:1.23.0 build --release

copy executable onto your raspi scp -P 100 target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/mta_status [email protected]:mta_status

Build for Docker on x86:

make build

Other

Some commands:

cargo install cargo-watch
cargo watch -x 'rustc --bin mta-status --features clippy -- -Z no-trans' //assumes nightly(see Cargo.toml)
cargo watch -x 'rustc --lib --features clippy -- -Z no-trans' //assumes nightly(see Cargo.toml)
cargo watch -x run
cargo build --release

Private Docs

cargo rustdoc --lib --open -- --no-defaults --passes collapse-docs --passes unindent-comments --passes strip-priv-imports

Future work (PR's are welcome)

add better logging
add better error handling
don't hit the MTA server on each request and instead cache the response in a local file
implement the service as multi-threaded
logo
make a client to use the api :)

mta-status's People