Dorifto Racing Version 2
Ever since I created dorifto.racing back in 2017, I always thought I would come around to revamping it. This is because it was built in-between classes while I was studying at university. The website was a product of endless caffeine, procrastination, and me wanting to waste my time during a weekend. I’ve had a lot more time to myself recently, so I decided to give Dorifto some new life. After 632 days of continuous uptime without updates, Dorifto has risen from the ashes reborn!
You can see the final product live at https://dorifo.racing
This re-architecture took me a bit longer than I initially expected. The intention was to make it more secure, stable, and easier to update. On the other hand, I also wanted to play around with a couple of interesting technologies while I was at it. Balancing these two objectives was tough, but I finally accomplished it.
The old architecture
In 2017 after I finished Dorifto, I left it mostly untouched for a very long time. Occasionally, I would fix the website when something hosting-related broke, but otherwise it was left alone. It was run on an ancient Ubuntu VPS that I had set up manually. I made no setup scripts, so I could not recreate it if I tried.
From what I remember, it was running Apache and the entire website was made in PHP. I had a MySQL database to keep track of IPs, so I could block abusers of the system. Every time someone requested a video, it would run a static version of FFMPEG to copy files around and splice them together.
Overall, there wasn’t much to it. It was just a pain in the ass to maintain and update. This meant that overtime all the dependencies became extremely old, and I was scared that some security vulnerability would ruin it.
The new architecture
Here is a complete list of things that have been introduced or improved:
- A set of update and setup scripts, so I can completely blow away a VPS and reconfigure it within minutes.
- The entire application is dockerized, so I can deploy it easily.
- The version of FFMPEG is updated dynamically.
- NGINX is used to host the server now, complete with SSL and auto-certificate renewal.
- A combination of Typescript, Bun, Hono, and HTMX are being used to deliver a great UI/UX.
- Loading indicators have been added so that you know your file is being processed.
- Fully server-sided rendering.
- Improved load time due to smaller assets.
- Improved accessibility due to HTML refactor.
- Better asynchronous job handling, which means multiple people can upload videos at once.
- Better styling.
- Automatic temporary file cleaning on the server side with CRON jobs.
- Easier updating of dependencies.
Conclusion
It was a massive amount of fun to recreate my own project from years ago. I have learned a lot about web development since I initially released the website, and it was really cool to be able to practice what I absorbed. It’s nice to be able to correct all my mistakes and (hopefully) give another 6 years of life to dorifto.racing.
To the users: Thank you for using my tool! I appreciate every single one of you!