Snippy - a Rock-Paper-Scissors bot tournament server

This is a demonstration project for using WebAssembly to sandbox untrusted code with minimal overhead.

The site is designed to allow anyone to uploaded their own bot to play rock-paper-scissors in multiple different programming languages. The bots are run in WebAssembly for sandboxing, and do not rely on OS-level sandboxing or separate processes.

Local development

You'll need node and yarn for the frontend client code. See: Installing Node and Installing Yarn

For the backend server, you'll need a Rust toolchain and Postgres installed. See Installing Rust and Cargo and Installing Postgres

Client (Web UI)

The UI code is stored in the client folder. It's a fairly standard React/TypeScript app.

Install dependencies:

cd client
yarn

To run the development server:

yarn start

This should automatically open a browser window at http://localhost:3000/.

The client code isn't very useful without the server and database behind it. The client devserver is configured to proxy to localhost:3001 for server requests (the default) so you can develop the client and server at the same time, despite the client running as a separate webserver.

Setup a database

Create a fresh postgres DB called snippy

createdb snippy

Then there's a script to create the necessary tables and populate it with some sample bots.

NOTE: This will also create a database user called snippyuser with login and (insecure) password. This is for local development only.

psql snippy < ./wasi-runner/local_setup.sql

In the wasi-runner folder, create a file called .env with the following contents.

DB_PASSWORD="snippy123"

Note: You can also set DB_HOST, DB_PORT and DB_USER but they default to localhost:5432 and snippyuser if not specified.

Build and run the server

In a separate terminal to the client devserver, go to the wasi-runner folder and run cargo run.

cd wasi-runner
cargo run

This will start the server on port 3001, the client devserver is set up to proxy API calls to this port.

The server may take about 15 seconds (or more depending on your machine) to start up because it loads the wasm engine and modules before starting the http server.

Check that the server is running correctly by visiting http://localhost:3001/ in the browser. If that loads, then the UI should also be able to run bots and tournaments via the API.