dilbert-feed

Note: The discontinuation of the Dilbert comic strip on March 12, 2023 has made the project futile in its current form.

Enjoy Dilbert in your RSS feed reader without any ads!

Unfortunetly, Dilbert's official feed now forces you to go to the website:

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

This serverless application provides a custom feed with direct access to Dilbert comics that gets updated every day.

For some background information, check out my article on Recreational Programming with Serverless.

PS: The Lambda functions used to be written in Go, now they're powered by Rust. 💪

Architecture

Requirements

You need the following to build and deploy dilbert-feed:

• Node.js + Yarn
• Rust + rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
• (On macOS, you also need the corresponding cross compiler toolchain)
• Make

Deployment

Follow these steps to deploy your own dilbert-feed instance to AWS.

Set AWS region and credentials in environment:

export AWS_REGION=eu-central-1
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...

Configure the heartbeat URL, e.g. as provided by Healthchecks.io:

aws ssm put-parameter --overwrite --name /dilbert-feed-dev/heartbeat-endpoint --type String --value <url>
aws ssm put-parameter --overwrite --name /dilbert-feed-prod/heartbeat-endpoint --type String --value <url>

Build the Lambdas and deploy the CDK stack:

# Bootstrap AWS CDK once
make bootstrap

# Deploy development environment
make dev

# Deploy production environment
make prod

Among other things, the stack outputs will show the URL of the RSS feed, which you can then subscribe:

dilbert-feed-prod.FeedUrl = https://dilbert-feed-example.s3.amazonaws.com/v2/rss.xml

Usage

The serverless stack will update the feed automatically. However, you can also invoke the Lambda functions manually.

Get the comic strip for today:

$ ./invoke dilbert-feed-prod-get-strip
{
  "date": "2019-10-22",
  "title": "Best Employees",
  "image_url": "https://assets.amuniversal.com/87b83e10c7460137c2df005056a9545d",
  "strip_url": "https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-10-22",
  "upload_url": "https://dilbert-feed-example.s3.amazonaws.com/strips/2019-10-22.gif"
}

Get the comic strip for a specific date:

$ ./invoke dilbert-feed-prod-get-strip --payload '{"date":"2016-01-01"}'
{
  "date": "2016-01-01",
  "title": "Forgetting Meetings",
  "image_url": "https://assets.amuniversal.com/1a6be66079e101332131005056a9545d",
  "strip_url": "https://dilbert.com/strip/2016-01-01",
  "upload_url": "https://dilbert-feed-example.s3.amazonaws.com/strips/2016-01-01.gif"
}

Get the comic strips for the last 30 days:

for i in $(seq 0 30); do date=$(gdate -I -d "today -$i days"); ./invoke dilbert-feed-prod-get-strip --payload "{\"date\":\"$date\"}"; done

Generate the RSS feed:

$ ./invoke dilbert-feed-prod-gen-feed
{
  "feed_url": "https://dilbert-feed-example.s3.amazonaws.com/v2/rss.xml"
}