Month: August 2018

Contentful to Neo4j in Elixir

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I just finished an initial port of my neo4j to contentful library from Node to Elixir.

https://github.com/chriseyre2000/contentful_to_neo4j_ex

This is the same utility but in a very different language. It’s not quite as polished as the Node version (but won’t take long to catch up).

Issues that I have had during the port:

  • My machine had a very old erlang implementation (I had installed this when reading the Erlang chapter of 7 languages in 7 weeks – over 7 years ago) which broke HTTPoison, a fairly common HTTP library. The errors pointed to HTTPoison not working on a windows machine (which I have found to not be true).
  • The Contentful Elixir bindings are not very advanced. They don’t return the total number of items that you are paging through. It was not difficult to use the api directly.
  • There are lots of Elixir bindings for Neo4j. Very few of them are clearly documented for writing to Neo4j. Eventually I landed on bolt_sips. Bolt is too primitive, neo4j_sips uses a very old version of HTTPoison.

The Elixir error messages are incredibly clear.

Credo is great for ensuring best practices are applied.

Functional programming allows you to test real code without mocks or spend time fighting promises.

iex is a great REPL environment. You can recompile a module and carry on without restarting everything.

The code is self documenting. This is the top level method:

read_all_assets()
|> read_all_entries
|> process_contentful
|> write_to_neo4j
VSCode is a great editor for elixir. It’s great from the command line
code .
The above will open vscode on the project in the current directory.

Httpoison on windows

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I have been having trouble getting the Httpoison library working on my windows development machine. I had put this down to portability issues in the past.

Last weekend I spent some time trying to track down the bug so that I could send a patch to the appropriate project.

During this investigation I found that I had been using a fairly old version of Erlang (10) which seemed to work everywhere else but had a problem with the crypto checking that HTTPoison performs. I had installed Erlang when studying 7 languages in 7 weeks over 6 years ago.

Moral of the story: don’t blame the tools, try to fix them and you may find the source of the problem.

Amazon Documentation Also Lies

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I have spent the last couple of days fighting with oauth 2.

This is based upon Cognito.

The basis of the oauth authentication is a multi step  dance. First you get the user to log in and are redirected back with a code. You need to send back the code with some shared secrets and it responds with a set of tokens.

These tokens do include the refresh token despite the docs saying that they don’t.

The next step is to fetch some user details. This has not yet been implemented yet the docs clearly state that it is there.

I have yet to find the renewal endpoint…

Update…

I have found out why cognito does not implement the ouath/userinfo endpoint.

It’s because the tokens endpoint returns a JWT token that includes the userinfo. I have yet to see if this is the most sane Bearer authentication token.