convrt.io

Convrt.io is an alternative chatting interface for the messenger provided by LinkedIn. Along with a well arranged design, convrt.io offers the possibility to sort your different contacts via a labeling functionality. Getting and sending messages via LinkedIn is realized with the refreshing button on the top right, which calls a python script that scrapes the data from LinkedIn, using the Selenium framework. The long-term goal is to implement an intelligent assistant, which helps the user organizing his messaging as well as his appointment scheduling.

The application is currently running inside several docker containers which are ready to be deployed on an AWS EC2 cloud instance.

Running the project

You can either run the project locally, locally with Docker or deploy it to a cloud provider, such as AWS. Local deployment is recommended for bugfixing and testing issues, while delivering to the cloud is good for providing the program to others.

Local deployment

• Install npm on your system
• Clone the repository
• cd into the project folder
• run npm run dev to launch the API
• cd into the "client" folder
• run npm run serve to launch the Vue.js frontend
• to build, run npm run build which will create a "dist" folder
• install "serve" by running npm i -g serve
• deploy with serve -s dist

Local Docker deployment

• Install and launch Docker on your system
• Clone the project, start a terminal session and 'cd' into the project folder
• Switch to branch 'experimental'
• Run make run, which takes a few seconds to build the project
• As soon as the setup has finished, visit http://localhost:5000 to access the applications frontend

Cloud deployment

• Sign up for a free cloud provider (AWS, Google...)
• Create a cloud instance, e.g. an AWS free tier which provides a 1GB storage Linux instance
• Expose ports 5000 and 3000 for frontend and api access
• create a .pem key-file for authorization
• Use SSH to start a terminal session inside your cloud instance. For AWS, run: ssh -i <path/to/your/key.pem> ec2-user@<instances-public-DNS>
• Once in your cloud instance, you have to install Git, Docker and Docker-Compose

sudo yum install git -y
sudo amazon-linux-extras install docker
sudo usermod -a -G docker ec2-user
sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.28.4/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

• Clone repository git clone https://github.com/dvahn/convrt.io.git
• Close terminal session and log back in to adopt all changes
• Open another terminal, ssh to instance and run sudo dockerd to start a docker daemon
• Head back to your first terminal session, cd into project folder and run make run
• After the setup, you can access the convrt application on instances-public-DNS:5000
• As an AWS EC2 free tier instance only has 1GB of storage, it is recommended to run docker image prune -a before each restart to delete unused docker images that can take up a lot of storage space

Workflow

After creating an account using your LinkedIn credentials and signing in you can use the refresh button on the top right to get your messages from LinkedIn via web scraping. When clicking the button the application will always crawl any new messages from LinkedIn as well as inserting the messages you sent via the convrt.io interface back into the LinkedIn messenger.

Bugs

When running the application in the cloud, the scraping sometimes fails, because LinkedIn does not instantly accept the login and sends a verification key to the current user. This is because the cloud instances is located in the US and all earlier logins were executed from our location, which is Germany. Unfortunately the code sometimes gets send a few minutes after the login "failed" and the scraping script exited, so that there is no way of getting the code and inserting in into the verification field. The same phenomenon occurs when using the application locally. Apparently, LinkedIn has implemented a mechanism that notices that the login data is not entered by a human user. This problem has to be solved in the future, maybe by setting up a proxy or trying to get around the extra verification process.

Debugging

As mentioned before it is highly recommended to develop new features using on of the local deployment methods, because you can see the impact of your changes straightaway. When deploying to the cloud, there should only be minor bugs left, as building and deploying each time you make a change is not that efficient. The most error-prone part of the application is scraping the data from LinkedIn. The elements read are specified as xpaths, which change every few days and thus lead to errors and disfunctionality of the program. To better see what exactly goes wrong in such a case, the VNC Viewer is recommended. Depending on the type of deployment, you can connect to either localhost:9001 or instances-public-IP:9001 and see live how the scraper acts and where exactly it screws up. In addition, the output of the scraping script is saved to a text file (sync_log.txt), which can provide information about any error messages.