This repository contains all of the services used to run mcsn.gg, a website built around speedrunning events, handling event planning, runner histories, real-time run management, and more.
It is intended to be a fully-powered service for running an event, including everything from initial planning and marketing, to signups, scheduling, and real-time data for presentation on the site itself as well as any consumers (such as stream layouts or other services) that may be interested.
This repository is set up such the each service is built as an independent project, with no directly-shared resources. The only service that interacts with others directly is mcsn_cli, which manages all orchestration of services talking to each other. Each service could be taken into its own repository and run completely separate from any other without needing any additional configuration.
If you want to run this repository locally on your own to test it out, contribute to its development, or even run your own production instance, you'll want to check out the mcsn_cli directory, which has instructions on how to get up and running with everything.
The other services (folders whose names that start with mcsn_) describe how to run them individually and the purpose they serve, but not how they orchestrate together.
MCSN does not directly support development on Windows. This is partly due to language constraints (Crystal does not support Windows as of yet), and partly because multi-platform development support is too much added complexity for something that wouldn't be supported for production deployment anyway.
MCSN relies on a few tools across all of its projects. To avoid forcing any kind of devops philosophy on your system, it is not installed automatically and is instead expected to be installed manually by you before starting development.
asdf-vm is a manager for version managers. There are plenty of tools out there for managing different versions of programming languages, like rbenv for Ruby, nvm for Node, and pyenv for Python, to name a few. asdf is a CLI tool that brings all of those other tools together and provides a consistent interface for working with them.
Using asdf, MCSN does not have to rely on any system executables and can stay completely in userland, even when installing and upgrading global binaries.
Instructions for how to install asdf can be found here.
Using the mcsn bootstrap command will install asdf plugins as needed to ensure that everything needed for installing dependencies will succeed. These include crystal, and nodejs (maybe others if this is out of date). It will first check if these plugins are already installed and only attempt to install them if they are not currently available.
Importantly, nodejs is frustrating and requires importing custom gpg keys to have simple version management. This is configurable, so if you are concerned by this, install the nodejs plugin first (or another plugin in place of it) and the bootstrap will not have to do anything.
yarn is an alternative package manager for javascript projects, taking the place of npm when used. MCSN chooses to use yarn for its ergonomics. While not necessarily better than npm, its clarity and consistency in the terminal is appreciated.
Instructions for how to install yarn can be found here.
MCSN uses Postgres for all of its persistent data storage. Because Postgres is so ubiquitous and is generally an "always-running" process on developer's machines, MCSN will not try to install and/or manage postgres, and it will just be expected to be running whenever working on MCSN services.
MCSN also expects that a user named mcsn with CREATEDB privileges exists. This is what all of the services will use to interact with postgres when running locally.
As of now, any officially-supported version of Postgres should be sufficient, but as always, being on the latest version is best.
Instructions for how to install postgres can be found here
An architectural overview of how everything fits together and why things are separated the way they are.
The process of creating a full production deployment (at least of the API service) is provided in mcsn_api/README.md. To summarize, this project uses Ansible to provision servers with appropriate permissions, firewalls, and user accounts to build and run generic services. It does not yet create specialized servers for difference services.