mta-status

mtaStatus is a REST API that returns MTA subway status in Json format.

It is written in Rust for all the wonderful reasons, but most importantly the fact that it results in a tiny service. The tiny runtime cost really shines when you deploy it on a raspberryPi, which has become my main source for testing and personal projects.

Why

The MTA is necessary if you live in NYC. It is also highly unreliable :| For this reason we need to keep an eye on which trains are running (especially for those early morning commutes).

• Now you have the option of using the wonderful widget that is provided by the MTA: http://www.mta.info/mta-service-status-widget
• Or maybe we like to view the status on our phones and the lack of a mobile site is annoying, so we look for an api: http://web.mta.info/status/serviceStatus.txt
• YES that is XML!! But wait is that HTML embedded inside the XML?? YES!

Therefore the nice Json API.

Build

Build for Raspi:

Source https://github.com/Ragnaroek/rust-on-raspberry-docker

Run from the root project dir:

docker run \
    --volume $PWD:/home/cross/project \
    --volume ~/.cargo/registry:/home/cross/.cargo/registry \
    ragnaroek/rust-raspberry:1.23.0 build --release

copy executable onto your raspi scp -P 100 target/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/mta_status pi@server.com:mta_status

Build for Docker on x86:

make build

Other

Some commands:

• cargo install cargo-watch
• cargo watch -x 'rustc --bin mta-status --features clippy -- -Z no-trans' //assumes nightly(see Cargo.toml)
• cargo watch -x 'rustc --lib --features clippy -- -Z no-trans' //assumes nightly(see Cargo.toml)
• cargo watch -x run
• cargo build --release

Private Docs

cargo rustdoc --lib --open -- --no-defaults --passes collapse-docs --passes unindent-comments --passes strip-priv-imports

Future work (PR's are welcome)

• add better logging
• add better error handling
• don't hit the MTA server on each request and instead cache the response in a local file
• implement the service as multi-threaded
• logo
• make a client to use the api :)