Re: [Guix Website] A Search Page for Packages

[Marius Bakke]

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Heya Danjela,
>>
>> Daniela Lura <danielaluraa@gmail.com> skribis:
>>
>>> Taking into consideration the suggestion made in this thread:
>>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-05/msg00096.html, my
>>> mentor, Christopher Baines suggested me to write a script that serves a
>>> search page for packages using the search functionality within the Guix
>>> Data Service,
>>> https://data.guix.gnu.org/repository/1/branch/master/latest-processed-revision/packages?search_query=git&field=version&field=synopsis&after_name=&limit_results=100
>>> .
>>>
>>> The prototype page can be accessed through a test version of the Guix
>>> website that Chris deployed:
>>> http://guix-website-test.cbaines.net/packages/search
>>
>> Cool!  To be clear, guix-website-test actually makes a search query on a
>> Data Service instance, right?  I guess that explains part of the
>> slowness, but maybe we could tweak nginx to keep search results in cache
>> for a few hours.
>>
>> Florian raised an important issue regarding the possibility of denial of
>> service.  Ideas on how to mitigate that, either in the Data Service, or
>> nginx at guix.gnu.org?
>
> On this point specifically, I've used the rate limiting functionality in
> NGinx before, and that's probably a low cost approach to guarding
> against this. It's not going to stop a DDOS, but might help avoid lots
> of requests from one IP address causing load issues.

We also have Varnish, a web caching proxy that excels at tasks like
this, and is used by some CDNs such as Fastly.  I'm happy to help write
a configuration if that is desired.

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