konkan-railway_live-train-position

This project provides a lightweight yet feature-rich, alternative frontend to the the Konkan Railway Current Train Position website.

The frontend is powered by ReactJS and the backend runs on Vercel Serverless Functions with Google Firebase as the caching database.

Based on sibi361/konkan-railway_api.

Available Endpoints

Current API version: 4

• /api/v4/fetchTrains Returns live status about all the trains currently moving on the Konkan Railway

• /api/v4/fetchTrain/<TRAIN-NUMBER> Returns an object containing information about the queried train such as - most recently touched station - arrived/departed time from that station - delay time i.e. whether the train is late or not

• /api/v4/fetchStations Returns an object containing all the stations on the Konkan Railway route

• /api/v4/fetchStation/<STATION-PLACE-NAME> Returns an object containing information about the queried station such as - type i.e. big station or small station - state - description

All endpoints return JSON containing a success flag and additionally two timestamps:

• lastFetchedAt: Time when our scraping server pinged the upstream
• lastUpdateAtUpstream: Time when the data on the upstream server was last updated

Additionally the version 2 API is available at /api/v2, for e.g. /api/v2/fetchTrains. Note that it is much slower than the version 4 API due to lack of upstream request caching.

Setup

• Clone this repository

  git clone https://github.com/sibi361/konkan-railway_live-train-position.git
  

• Install NodeJS
• Install dependencies

  cd konkan-railway_live-train-position
  npm install
  

Local Testing

• Run the server

  npm run dev
  

• Visit the site at the displayed URL

Vercel Deployment

• Vercel setup
  • Create account
  • Create team
  • Click on the "Storage" tab and create a Postgres database
  • Generate a secret UUIDv4 token and add it as an environment variable in the "Environment Variables" settings page with the key name as SECRET_UPSTREAM_UPDATE
  • Go to the Webhook settings located at vercel[.]com/teams/<your-team-name>/settings/webhooks and add a webhook for the deployment.succeeded event for this URL: /api/v4/scrapeStations?token=<YOUR-SECRET_UPSTREAM_UPDATE-TOKEN>
• Google Firebase Setup
  • Create a new project and then create a new Firebase Realtime Database at https://console.firebase.google.com/
    • Set the permissions to private as we shall be using Google OAuth to connect to the database
  • Generate a new config JSON file at https://console.firebase.google.com/project/<YOUR_PROJECT_NAME>/settings/serviceaccounts/adminsdk
  • Create a _dbSecrets.js file in api/v4 using api/\_dbSecrets.js.example as a template and fill in the private_key and client_email from the JSON file obtained in the previous step
• Install dependencies

  npm install
  

• Pull environment variables locally

  vercel env pull .env.development.local
  

• Test run the server

  vercel dev
  

• Deploy

  vercel --prod
  

• Visit the site at the displayed URL
• Configure a web service / cron job to periodically ping the /api/v4/scrapeTrains?token=<YOUR-SECRET_UPSTREAM_UPDATE-TOKEN> endpoint to trigger an upstream update

TODO

• Implement data caching in DB
• Migrate DB to Firebase
• Build a frontend
• Send PR to public-api-lists

Changelog

• v4: Migrated Scraper and Database
  • Moved from browser based Playwright to JSSoup; a JS fork of Beautiful Soup
  • Switched caching database to Firebase Realtime Database thereby overcoming Vercel Postgres quota limits
• v3: Added caching with Postgres DB
• v2: Refactored code to host on Vercel Serverless Functions
• v1: sibi361/konkan-railway_api

Motivation

Due to poor network connectivity near most railway stations and during transit, the Current Train Position site with a size of ~250KB would take a long time to load.

When deployed on a cloud server, this API can instantly fetch the upstream site and send the required information to the client, consuming well under 1KB, hence leaving no chance for lag.

~550 Bytes versus ~120KB, that too without the assets

Legal

This project is in no way affiliated or related to any railway or other company/organization, for e.g. Indian Railways. It is a completely independent and not-for-profit API built for educational purposes only.