Peterbe.com

I have an app that allows you to upload images. The images are stored using Firebase Storage. Then, once uploaded I have a Firebase Cloud Function that can turn that into a thumbnail. The problem with this is that it takes a long time to wake up the cloud function, the first time, and generating that thumbnail. Not to mention the download of the thumbnail payload for the client. It's not unrealistic that the whole thumbnail generation plus download can take multiple (single digit) seconds. But you don't want to have the user sit and wait that long. My solution is to display the uploaded file in a <img> tag using URL.createObjectURL().

The following code is most pseudo-code but should look familiar if you're used to how Firebase and React/Preact works. Here's the FileUpload component:

interface Props {
  onUploaded: ({ file, filePath }: { file: File; filePath: string }) => void;
  onSaved?: () => void;
}

function FileUpload({
  onSaved,
  onUploaded,
}: Props) => {
  const [file, setFile] = useState<File | null>(null);

  // ...some other state stuff omitted for example.

  useEffect(() => {
    if (file) {
      const metadata = {
        contentType: file.type,
    };

    const filePath = getImageFullPath(prefix, item ? item.id : list.id, file);
    const storageRef = storage.ref();

    uploadTask = storageRef.child(filePath).put(file, metadata);
    uploadTask.on(
      "state_changed",
      (snapshot) => {
        // ...set progress percentage
      },
      (error) => {
        setUploadError(error);
      },
      () => {
        onUploaded({ file, filePath });  // THE IMPORTANT BIT!

        db.collection("pictures")
          .add({ filePath })
          .then(() => { onSaved() })

      }
    }
  }, [file])

  return (
      <input
        type="file"
        accept="image/jpeg, image/png"
        onInput={(event) => {
          if (event.target.files) {
            const file = event.target.files[0];
            validateFile(file);
            setFile(file);
          }
        }}
      />
  );
}

The important "trick" is that we call back after the storage is complete by sending the filePath and the file back to whatever component triggered this component. Now, you can know, in the parent component, that there's going to soon be an image reference with a file path (filePath) that refers to that File object.

Here's a rough version of how I use this <FileUpload> component:

function Images() {

  const [uploadedFiles, setUploadedFiles] = useState<Map<string, File>>(
    new Map()
  );

  return (<div>  
    <FileUpload
      onUploaded={({ file, filePath }: { file: File; filePath: string }) => {
        const newMap: Map<string, File> = new Map(uploadedFiles);
        newMap.set(filePath, file);
        setUploadedFiles(newMap);
      }}
      />

    <ListUploadedPictures uploadedFiles={uploadedFiles}/>
    </div>
  );
}

function ListUploadedPictures({ uploadedFiles}: {uploadedFiles: Map<string, File>}) {

  // Imagine some Firebase Firestore subscriber here
  // that watches for uploaded pictures. 
  return <div>
    {pictures.map(picture => (
      <Picture picture={picture} uploadedFiles={uploadedFiles} />
    ))}
  </div>
}

function Picture({ 
  uploadedFiles,
  picture,
}: {
  uploadedFiles: Map<string, File>;
  picture: {
    filePath: string;
  }
}) {
  const thumbnailURL = getThumbnailURL(filePath, 500);
  const [loaded, setLoaded] = useState(false);

  useEffect(() => {
    const preloadImg = new Image();
    preloadImg.src = thumbnailURL;

    const callback = () => {
      if (mounted) {
        setLoaded(true);
      }
    };
    if (preloadImg.decode) {
      preloadImg.decode().then(callback, callback);
    } else {
      preloadImg.onload = callback;
    }

    return () => {
      mounted = false;
    };
  }, [thumbnailURL]);

  return <img
    style={{
      width: 500,
      height: 500,
      "object-fit": "cover",
    }}
    src={
      loaded
        ? thumbnailURL
        : file
        ? URL.createObjectURL(file)
        : PLACEHOLDER_IMAGE
    }
  />
}

Phew! That was a lot of code. Sorry about that. But still, this is just a summary of the real application code.

The point is that; I send the File object back to the parent component immediately after having uploaded it to Firebase Cloud Storage. Then, having access to that as a File object, I can use that as the thumbnail while I wait for the real thumbnail to come in. Now, it doesn't matter that it takes 1-2 seconds to wake up the cloud function and 1-2 seconds to perform the thumbnail creation, and then 0.1-2 seconds to download the thumbnail. All the while this is happening you're looking at the File object that was uploaded. Visually, the user doesn't even notice the difference. If you refresh the page, that temporary in-memory uploadedFiles (Map instance) is empty so you're now relying on the loading of the thumbnail which should hopefully, at this point, be stored in the browser's native HTTP cache.

The other important part of the trick is that we're using const preloadImg = new Image() for loading the thumbnail. And by relying on preloadImage.decode ? preloadImage.decode().then(...) : preload.onload = ... we can be informed only when the thumbnail has been successfully created and successfully downloaded to make the swap.

Remember jQuery? Yeah, it was great. But it was also horrible in its own ways but only when compared to the more powerful tools that we have now as of 2021. I still (almost) use it here on my site. Atually, I use "fork" of jQuery called Cash which calls itself: "An absurdly small jQuery alternative for modern browsers."
Cash is written in TypeScript, which gives me peace of mind, and as a JS bundle, it's only 19KB minified (5.3KB Brotli compressed) whereas jQuery is 87KB minified (27KB Brotli compressed).

But something that jQuery has, that Cash doesn't, is animations. E.g. $('myselector').fadeIn(). If you need to do this with Cash you can use the following pure JavaScript solution:

// Example implementation

const msg = $('<div class="message">')
  .text(`Random message: ${Math.random()}`)
  .css("opacity", 0)
  .css("transition", "opacity 600ms")
  .prependTo($("#root"));
setTimeout(() => msg.css("opacity", 1), 0);

setTimeout(() => {
  msg.css("transition", "opacity 1000ms").css("opacity", 0);
  setTimeout(() => msg.remove(), 1000);
}, 3000);

What this application demonstrates is the creation of a <div> that's immediately injected into the DOM but slowly fades into view. And 3 seconds later it fades out and is removed. Full demo/sample application here.

Sample application using cash like jQuery's $.fadeIn().

The point of the demo is how you can cause the fade-in effect with just Cash but still relies on CSS for the actual animation.
The trick is to, ultimately, create it first like this:

<div class="message" style="opacity:0; transition: opacity 600ms">
  Random message: 0.6517198324628395
</div>

and then, right after it's been added to the DOM, change the style=... to:

-<div class="message" style="opacity:0; transition: opacity 600ms">
+<div class="message" style="opacity:1; transition: opacity 600ms">

What's neat about this is that you use the transition shortcut so it's done entirely with CSS instead of a requestAnimationFrame and/or while-loop like jQuery's effects.js does it.

Note! This is not a polyfill since jQuery's fadeIn() (etc.) can do a lot more such as callbacks. The example might not be great but I hope this little solution becomes useful for someone else who needs this.

Because it was driving me insane, and because I don't want to ever forget...

Playwright is a wonderful alternative to jest-puppeteer for doing automated headless browser end-to-end testing. But one I couldn't find in the documentation, Google search, or Stackoverflow was: How do you submit a form without clicking a button?. I.e. you have focus in an input field and hit Enter. Here's how you do it:

await page.$eval('form[role="search"]', (form) => form.submit());

The first part is any CSS selector that gets you to the <form> element. In this case, imagine it was:

<form action="/search" role="search">
  <input type="search" name="q">
</form>

You, or my future self, might be laughing at me for missing something obvious but this one took me forever to solve so I thought I'd better blog about it in case someone else gets into the same jam.

UPDATE (Sep 2021)

I found a much easier way:

await page.keyboard.press("Enter");

This obviously only works when you've typed something into an input so the focus is on that <input> element. E.g.:

await page.fill('input[aria-label="New shopping list item"]', "Carrots");
await page.keyboard.press("Enter");

We use Poetry in a GitHub project. There's a pyproject.toml file (and a poetry.lock file) which with the help of the executable poetry gets you a very reliable Python environment. The only problem is that adding the poetry executable is slow. Like 10+ seconds slow. It might seem silly but in the project I'm working on, that 10+s delay is the slowest part of a GitHub Action workflow which needs to be fast because it's trying to post a comment on a pull request as soon as it possibly can.

First I tried caching $(pip cache dir) so that the underlying python -v pip install virtualenv -t $tmp_dir that install-poetry.py does would get a boost from avoiding network. The difference was negligible. I also didn't want to get too weird by overriding how the install-poetry.py works or even make my own hacky copy. I like being able to just rely on the snok/install-poetry GitHub Action to do its thing (and its future thing).

The solution was to cache the whole $HOME/.local directory. It's as simple as this:

- name: Load cached $HOME/.local
  uses: actions/cache@v2.1.6
  with:
    path: ~/.local
    key: dotlocal-${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('.github/workflows/pr-deployer.yml') }}

The key is important. If you do copy-n-paste this block of YAML to speed up your GitHub Action, please remember to replace .github/workflows/pr-deployer.yml with the name of your .yml file that uses this. It's important because otherwise, the cache might be overzealously hot when you make a change like:

       - name: Install Python poetry
-        uses: snok/install-poetry@v1.1.6
+        uses: snok/install-poetry@v1.1.7
         with:

...for example.

Now, thankfully install-poetry.py (which is the recommended way to install poetry by the way) can notice that it's already been created and so it can omit a bunch of work. The result of this is as follows:

From 10+ seconds to 2 seconds. And what's neat is that the optimization is very "unintrusive" because it doesn't mess with how the snok/install-poetry workflow works.

But wait, there's more!

If you dig up our code where we use poetry you might find that it does a bunch of other caching too. In particular, it caches .venv it creates too. That's relevant but ultimately unrelated. It basically caches the generated virtualenv from the poetry install command. It works like this:

- name: Load cached venv
  id: cached-poetry-dependencies
  uses: actions/cache@v2.1.6
  with:
    path: deployer/.venv
    key: venv-${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('**/poetry.lock') }}-${{ hashFiles('.github/workflows/pr-deployer.yml') }}

...

- name: Install deployer
  run: |
    cd deployer
    poetry install
  if: steps.cached-poetry-dependencies.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'

In this example, deployer is just the name of the directory, in the repository root, where we have all the Python code and the pyproject.toml etc. If you have yours at the root of the project you can just do: run: poetry install and in the caching step change it to: path: .venv.

Now, you get a really powerful complete caching strategy. When the caches are hot (i.e. no changes to the .yml, poetry.lock, or pyproject.toml files) you get the executable (so you can do poetry run ...) and all its dependencies in roughly 2 seconds. That'll be hard to beat!

tl;dr; To make 2 lists into 1 without mutating them use list1 + list2.

I'm blogging about this because today I accidentally complicated my own code. From now on, let's just focus on the right way.

Suppose you have something like this:

winners = [123, 503, 1001]
losers = [45, 812, 332]

combined = winners + losers

that will create a brand new list. To prove that it's immutable:

>>> combined.insert(0, 100)
>>> combined
[100, 123, 503, 1001, 45, 812, 332]
>>> winners
[123, 503, 1001]
>>> losers
[45, 812, 332]

What I originally did was:

winners = [123, 503, 1001]
losers = [45, 812, 332]

combined = [*winners, *losers]

This works the same and that syntax feels very JavaScript'y. E.g.

> var winners = [123, 503, 1001]
[ 123, 503, 1001 ]
> var losers = [45, 812, 332]
[ 45, 812, 332 ]
> var combined = [...winners, ...losers]
[ 123, 503, 1001, 45, 812, 332 ]
> combined.pop()
332
> losers
[ 45, 812, 332 ]

By the way, if you want to filter out duplicates, do this:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = [2, 3, 4]
>>> list(dict.fromkeys(a + b))
[1, 2, 3, 4]

It's the most performant way to do it if the order is important.

And if you don't care about the order you can use this:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3]
>>> b = [2, 3, 4]
>>> list(set(a + b))
[1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> list(set(b + a))
[1, 2, 3, 4]

This is how MDN Web Docs uses Elasticsearch. Daily, we build all the content and then upload it all using elasticsearch-dsl using aliases. Because there are no good complete guides to do this, I thought I'd write it down for the next person who needs to do something similar. Let's jump straight into the code. The reader will need a healthy dose of imagination to fill in their details.

Indexing

# models.py

from datetime.datetime import utcnow

from elasticsearch_dsl import Document

PREFIX = "myprefix"


class MyDocument(Document):
    title = Text()
    body = Text()
    # ...

    class Index:
        name = (
            f'{PREFIX}_{utcnow().strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S")}'
        )

What's important to note here is that the MyDocument.Index.name is dynamically allocated every single time the module is imported. It's not very important exactly what it is called but it's important that it becomes unique each time.
This means that when you start using MyDocument it will automatically figure out which index to use. Now, it's time to create the index and bulk publish it.

# index.py
# Note! This example code skips over things like progress bars
# and verbose logging and misc sanity checks and stuff.

from elasticsearch.helpers import parallel_bulk
from elasticsearch_dsl import Index
from elasticsearch_dsl.connections import connections

from .models import MyDocument, PREFIX


def index(buildroot: Path, url: str, update=False):
    """
    * 'buildroot' is where the files are we're going to read and index
    * 'url' is the host URL for the Elasticsearch server
    * 'update' is if just want to "cake on" a couple of documents 
      instead of starting over and doing a complete indexing.
    """

    # Connect and stuff
    connections.create_connection(hosts=[url], retry_on_timeout=True)
    connection = connections.get_connection()
    health = connection.cluster.health()
    status = health["status"]
    if status not in ("green", "yellow"):
        raise Exception(f"status {status} not green or yellow")

    if update:
        for name in connection.indices.get_alias():
            if name.startswith(f"{PREFIX}_"):
                document_index = Index(name)
                break
        else:
            raise IndexAliasError(
                f"Unable to find an index called {PREFIX}_*"
            )

    else:
        # Confusingly, `._index` is actually not a private API.
        # It's the documented way you're supposed to reach it.
        document_index = MyDocument._index
        document_index.create()

    def generator():
        for doc in Path(buildroot):
            # The reason for specifying the exact index name is that we might
            # be doing an update and if you don't specify it, elasticsearch_dsl
            # will fall back to using whatever Document._meta.Index automatically
            # becomes in this moment.
            yield to_search(doc, _index=document_index._name).to_dict(True)

    for success, info in parallel_bulk(connection, generator()):
        # 'success' is a boolean
        # 'info' has stuff like:
        #  - info["index"]["error"]
        #  - info["index"]["_shards"]["successful"]
        #  - info["index"]["_shards"]["failed"]
        pass

    if update:
        # When you do an update, Elasticsearch will internally delete the
        # previous docs (based on the _id primary key we set).
        # Normally, Elasticsearch will do this when you restart the cluster
        # but that's not something we usually do.
        # See https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/indices-forcemerge.html
        document_index.forcemerge()
    else:
        # Now we're going to bundle the change to set the alias to point
        # to the new index and delete all old indexes.
        # The reason for doing this together in one update is to make it atomic.
        alias_updates = [
            {"add": {"index": document_index._name, "alias": PREFIX}}
        ]
        for index_name in connection.indices.get_alias():
            if index_name.startswith(f"{PREFIX}_"):
                if index_name != document_index._name:
                    alias_updates.append({"remove_index": {"index": index_name}})
        connection.indices.update_aliases({"actions": alias_updates})

    print("All done!")



def to_search(file: Path, _index=None):
    with open(file) as f:
        data = json.load(f)
    return MyDocument(
        _index=_index,
        _id=data["identifier"],
        title=data["title"],
        body=data["body"]
    )

A lot is left to the reader as an exercise to fill in but these are the most important operations. It demonstrates how you can

1. Correctly create indexes
2. Atomically create an alias and clean up old indexes (and aliases)
3. How you can add to an existing index

After you've run this you'll see something like this:

$ curl http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v
...
health status index                   uuid                   pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
yellow open   myprefix_20210514141421 vulVt5EKRW2MNV47j403Mw   1   1      11629            0     28.7mb         28.7mb

$ curl http://localhost:9200/_cat/aliases?v
...
alias    index                   filter routing.index routing.search is_write_index
myprefix myprefix_20210514141421 -      -             -              -

Searching

When it comes to using the index, well, it depends on where your code for that is. For example, on MDN Web Docs, the code that searches the index is in an entirely different code-base. It's incidentally Python (and elasticsearch-dsl) in both places but other than that they have nothing in common. So for the searching, you need to manually make sure you write down the name of the index (or name of the alias if you prefer) into the code that searches. For example:

from elasticsearch_dsl import Search

def search(params):
    search_query = Search(index=settings.SEARCH_INDEX_NAME)

    # Do stuff to 'search_query' based on 'params'

    response = search_query.execute()   
    for hit in response:
        # ...

If you're within the same code that has that models.MyDocument in the first example code above, you can simply do things like this:

from elasticsearch_dsl import Index
from elasticsearch_dsl.connections import connections

from .models import PREFIX


def analyze(
    url: str,
    text: str,
    analyzer: str,
):
    connections.create_connection(hosts=[url])
    index = Index(PREFIX)
    analysis = index.analyze(body={"text": text, "analyzer": analyzer})
    # ...