FlightsForBites.com (was: General Aviation Accessible Restaurants)

I cannot make updates to the site for the next two weeks so hopefully it's on cruise control. I have to say, I'm surprised by the adoption. Today there's been ~400 interactions w/ the site i.e. users finding, searching, or entering restaurants or comments. Several questioned the crowd-sourcing approach, and, maybe it will fizzle out. So far, that has not been the case.

I looked into HTTPS support and I'll probably have to take the site down for a period to make that happen. And the URL will change, dropping the :8080 port in the URL. So, please start using the FlightsForBites.com URL and that will minimize any disruption.

 

Got this when I edited a comment

Whitelabel Error Page

This application has no explicit mapping for /error, so you are seeing this as a fallback.
Thu Aug 18 21:45:17 EDT 2022
There was an unexpected error (type=Internal Server Error, status=500).

Maybe comment was too long?

 

You're gonna need to upgrade to a RockPi at this rate

 

Comments can be 1000 characters. I can make it bigger. The only other thing I can think of that might have caused the issue is if you composed your comment elsewhere and inadvertently pasted in a control character.

 

Just entered 2 on-airport restaurants that I've flown to. I think this site is great - no frills, just provide the info efficiently. Great work!

 

I don't think I had any special characters, I just typed in stuff about a crew car but it might have been over 1000 characters. I will try it again.

 

Ever since the pandemic, we've gotten in the habit of checking a restaurant's Facebook page to verify their operating status before heading out. Often times restaurants will post regular updates with hours or post a notification that they're closed (usually for staffing issues) or closing early. If not, we'll call if we're going out of our way, whether it's by car or plane--we've been burned a few times.

 

What are you running? LetsEncrypt should be extremely easy to run. Let me know if you'd like help!

 

Tomcat9. These instructions don't look so easy to me Hopefully I can knock this out tonight.

 

Don't set up SSL directly on Tomcat, use nginx as a reverse proxy (and potentially load balancer) and let certbot do its thing. Let me know if you want help setting it up.

 

Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it. The instructions here are not working failing with Certbot not being able to start a server on port 80 despite my opening that port to the outside.

 

If you haven't been able to tell, I don't ask for help until I've been wrestled to the ground. Let's see how this goes You're last post was over my head but I'll figure it out.

 

I'm not here to judge, I'm trying to be helpful
I've been doing professional software engineering for over 15 years, I'm here to help and mentor.

I do admire your attitude, some people only learn by doing it themselves.

 

Awesome, even more voluminous instructions Seriously, this whole project was about learning. Just when I though I was mostly down that road I'm slapped in the face!

 

If you're overwhelmed, let me know and we could discuss outside of the forum. Most of that guide is junk/fluff and you most likely don't need 90% of that.

 

Absolutely! I get that. Sorry if my responses seem non-appreciative. I've been in software "management" for years so I give myself projects like this so I can better understand the issues my teams surface. All is good!!

 

Thanks for the offer. I'll let you know. I'm seriously OCD so it takes a lot to overwhelm me

 

Looks like it will not happen tonight I still need to fight this some more @Leyrah before I ask for help.

Sep 08 20:36:38 ubuntu nginx[2307]: nginx: [emerg] bind() to [::]:80 failed (98: Unknown error)
Sep 08 20:36:38 ubuntu nginx[2307]: nginx: [emerg] still could not bind()
Sep 08 20:36:38 ubuntu systemd[1]: nginx.service: Control process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Sep 08 20:36:38 ubuntu systemd[1]: nginx.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Sep 08 20:36:38 ubuntu systemd[1]: Failed to start A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server.

 

Reminder that port 80 requires root. ubuntu should already have nginx running and configured out of the repos, you just need to point it to the port that Tomcat is running (which should be set to not 80, some usual candidates are 3000, 6000 and 8080)

 

That is awesome, I put in RPJ and found "The flight deck lounge"
Now we need to add comments so we can recommend when to go there.
better on a sunny saturday afternoon in the summer or fall...

And a Great place to take your non-pilot friends!


One Fix, I should be able to enter either "KRPJ" or "RPJ" .
Currently it does not find KRPJ.

 

BTW, I did try to add a comment and got this:

Whitelabel Error Page
This application has no explicit mapping for /error, so you are seeing this as a fallback.

Thu Sep 08 21:19:48 EDT 2022
There was an unexpected error (type=Internal Server Error, status=500).

 

That's probably b/c your comment is >1000 characters. On my todo list is adding a validation to catch that. I just upgraded my development machine and have lost some of my development tools

 

@Chicago Bearhawk , thanks for letting me know. I saw a saw an error in the logs and now b/c of your post I know what it means. Logs can be very cryptic.

 

I just want to say from the outside of this conversation that I commend your generosity and empathy in this discussion. Your experience and offer strike me as the soul of generosity. It has added a lift to my day.

 

I spent about 6 hours on this today and it's still not working I'm sure you could walk me through it pretty quickly, but, I'm stubborn, I haven't given up yet.

 

did you check the flux capacitor and the alternator fluid?

 

Yea, yea, yea. The real reason I haven't reached out to @Leyrah is b/c I'm sure he'll quickly point out how much of an idiot I am in like two seconds. I'd rather spend many days on this before asking for help . But frankly, I'm not sure what HTTPS buys me other than I can post links on FB. I'm about to give up b/c I just don't see the value.

 

It also means that people's browsers won't scream bloody murder every time they try to access it! My browser sets off alarm bells making sure I intend to visit a non secured site.

 

Okay. I haven't given up yet, I'm just on the ground with my arm twisted behind my back with a couple more avenues of pursuit before I give up!

 

We're closing in on 200 restaurants!! Despite @Leyrah 's remedial education, and many, many hours, I haven't been able to get HTTS working. I haven't given up yet. The networking stuff is a whole lot more complicated/nuanced than I expected it would be.

 

There was a bug saving edits to existing comments. I have fixed it.

 

I put in four places. Did I miss a field to enter distance, or is it supposed to use the maps link somehow?

 

This would be so much easier to do on aws

 

I'm sure Mahneuvers will appreciate your offer to cover the $30/mo or so for an ec2 instance plus baggage, over the practically free raspberry pi he's using now.

 

You could do it with lambdas for pennys a month. Would have to redesign though.

 

In an attempt to keep it simple, users only specify restaurant proximity to airport (on field, short walk...). People have noted the subjective limitation of one person's short walk might be another's short drive. Having users enter lat/lon is unlikely considering GM links is proving problematic for some. Maybe at some point I'll scrape restaurant lat/lon from the GM link and calculate miles. I'm hoping, for now, the GM link let's people quickly decide if a restaurant is close enough to an airport for their purposes.

The app calculates distances but only between airports or between airports and a route. So when you find restaurants w/in 100 miles of an airport, the app is returning to you the restaurants at all airports w/in 100 miles.

Edit: Entering miles instead of proximity can be problematic too. I'm reminded of when my daughter was studying abroad in Italy. She arrived in a small town late at night by train, the place she was staying was less than a mile from the station, but there was no way to walk it b/c of roads, fences and other barriers. This is why the GM link and comments are so important.

 

I have, and b/c of the HTTPS configuration, continue to learn a ton b/c of this project so I have no problem with the current architecture. I investigated AWS and other solutions early on but didn't see options that weren't going to cost me hundreds a year, I'm sure, b/c I was specifically looking for LAMP support. Several have suggested alternative architectures and should I get another hair brained idea I'll check them out

 

it's a great project to learn on. Why not learn new tech though, rather than 2 decade old tech? Seriously, if you use serverless options on aws, you can easily do it within the free tier.

 

Thymeleaf = 10 years old, Spring Boot = 8 yo, Ubuntu on RPi = 4 yo, running a headless server, for me, never done it. But I hear and understand what you're saying. It's a case of you don't know what you don't know.

 

I was referring to LAMP @ 2 decades.

Didn't mean to dump on you, just wanted you to know costs shouldn't scare you away.