liftie.info

Clean, simple, easy to read, fast ski resort lift status.

Features

Displays multiple resorts on a single page.
Refreshes automatically every 65 seconds.
Index page displays all supported resorts but it's possible to specify (and bookmark) a subset:
```
  https://liftie.info?resorts=alpine,palisades
```

REST type API returns a status of each resort.

  GET https://liftie.info/api/resort/<resort>

Status is cached on a server side. Regardless of the number of browser request, server will retrieve (and parse) the resort pages only once per minute.

How to run liftie locally

Clone this repo (or your fork)

git clone git@github.com:pirxpilot/liftie.git && cd liftie

Build client side scripts: make will install all external components and trigger component build for you.

make

Run and profit (liftie binds to port 3000 by default)

node app

How to add your favorite `acme.com` resort

Generate resort scaffolding

The easiest way to start working on a new resort is to run generate script.

$./bin/generate

The script expects the short (one word, dashes OK) identifier of the ski resort, the human readable name and the URL of the page with lift status. It also asks for resort geographical coordinates.

The following files are generated for a newly added resort:

resort descriptor lib/resort/acme/resort.json,
parser lib/resort/acme/index.js,
and a test for a parsing function test/resort/acme.js.
lift status page retrieved from internet test/resort/example/acme.html

You can check this commit to see what you can expect after this page is completed.

Newly added resort is displayed automatically on liftie index page, but it won't have any lifts at this stage.

Update test

Now you can flesh out the test by adding expected list of ski lifts. See this commit.

var expected = {
  'Super Express Lift': 'closed',
  'Magic Carpet': 'open',
  'Ultra Gondola': 'hold',
  'T-Bar': 'scheduled'
};

At this point you should probably run the tests: since parsing function is not implemented the test will fail.

You can run only the specific resort test by running:

make test TESTS="**/*/acme.js"

Implement parser

lib/resorts/acme/index.js exports the following object

module.exports = {
  selector: '.lifts',                // selector for lift information
  parse: {
    filter: node => node.children,   // if present skips nodes for which filter is falsy
    name: '0/1',            // example of a simple path descriptor (second child of the first child)
    status: {               // example of a compound descriptor
      child: '+/1',
      attribute: 'alt',
      regex: /-([a-z]+)$/,
      fn: s => s.slice(0, -3)
    }
  }
};

You need to adjust it to find the lift names and their statuses:

selector is a CSS selector that should locate the parent of the name and status elements
parse needs to contain 2 descriptors - one for name and the other for status
name and status descriptors have the following properties
- child - dash-separated path to the name or status HTML element - index, ,, .., +, - are supported
- attribute - optional - if specified the value of the attribute instead of the contents of the element is used
- regex - optional - if specified the regex is executed and the value of the first matching group is used
- fn - optional - if specified the function is called that can be used to convert the value

If child is the only part of the descriptor it can be used directly. In other words:

name: {
  child: '0/3'
}

is the same as

name: '0/3'

Check out this commit to see the simple parser implemented.

Once parser is ready the tests should succeed.

Improvements

improve weather - US resorts can have more precise weather forecast, if there is a NOAA station nearby: run bin/fetch-noaa --overwrite <resort-name> to find it
add webcams - normally just specifying position would add some webcams to the liftie page but you can also just add links to the webcams in resort.json descriptor

Alternative status source

In some cases the lift status info is not directly accessible on the web page to which liftie should be redirecting its users. For example lift status might be contained in an invisible iframe or retrieved from a 3rd party server. In such cases specify dataUrl in addition to the url entry in the resort descriptor.

Liftie will always use url to construct the link to the relevant resort page, and - if present - it will use dataUrl to retrieve the page that is subsequently parsed to obtain lift information.

Resort JSON API

In addition to parsing lift status pages Liftie supports resorts that make their lift status available through REST API. In such cases you need to specify api element in resort descriptor.

"api": {
  "host": "http://api.acme.com",
  "pathname": "/api/status"
}

If api is specified Liftie will retrieve status info through HTTP GET. The resort parse function will receive parsed json instead of the dom tree. Please note that you still need to configure url - it is used on Liftie pages to send users to official resort page. Check out this implementation, if you are looking for an example.