decktape
decktape copied to clipboard
astefanutti
Hosted version of decktape?
Is there a hosted version of decktape anywhere? I'm picturing a simple webpage to which I can give a URL for a presentation and have it give me the PDF. Just curious if such a thing exists.
@abingham There is no hosted version for the time being. That would make sense. As an option / alternative, there are a couple of PhantomJS hosting services out there. Though as long as DeckTape relies on an enhanced version of PhantomJS, that won't be possible to use those with DeckTape.
I can't make any promises, but if I find some free time (ha!) I might take a swing at a basic version of something like this.
In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, though, I imagine this wouldn't take very long at all.
That'd be awesome. At some point, I'll work on it. though that's not high in my list. Let me know.
If you are happy to build your slideshow presentations using Markdown then you might want to check out GitPitch. It's a new hosted service that lets you, among other things, print slideshow presentations to PDF. It uses decktape in the background. Thanks to @astefanutti.
In my spare time I've been tinkering with decktape.io, another hosted version of decktape. It's close to basic functionality, though not quite there yet...it should just be a matter of one or two more hours of work. Once it's limping along I'll see about hosting it somewhere.
I've put up a rough hosted version of decktape here. It seems to work for the small workloads I've thrown at it, but it certainly won't scale well right now.
The basic idea is that a casual user should be able to enter the URL of a presentation and get a PDF version after conversion is done. When they enter a URL, I display any existing conversions of that URL that we happen to have stored, along with the dates of those conversions. This could in principle save some time for some users, but it also feels clunky. I'd rather be able to auto-detect if a cached version is available (and thus not do another conversion), but I haven't spent any time sorting out how to efficiently do the hashing that would be necessary for that.
Also, FWIW, I probably won't use the decktape.io domain. It's a bit too pricey for a hobby project like this.
@abingham that's awesome!
I've just registered the decktape.io domain so we can point to your host whenever it's ready. That'd be even more awesome to have it elastic to the load though we can start small and throttle if needed.
Great! Feel free to point the domain to that address any time you want. It's a google cloud machine, and the IP will likely change at some point, but for now it should be stable. I've got some ideas for fixing the scaling and timeout issues; I just need to find some time to work on it.
An improved version of decktape.io is now up and running at http://104.199.0.251/. I'll look into getting a static IP address at some point, but I think this will stay stable as long as I don't restart the instance (it's a a google cloud machine).
The scaling and stability issues should be largely addressed now. We now have a task queue (rabbitmq) handling conversion requests, and the web front-end has been redesigned around a polling approach. I'm sure I'll keep poking around at it for a while, but I think it's ready to handle at least a moderate amount of use.
Awesome!
I've just released version 1.0.0 that fixes a couple of issues, most notably #3. So that'd be interesting to upgrade your hosted version to that version (Thanks to #66 there is now only one Linux binary).
I'll update the DNS entries for decktape.io ASAP to point to your IP, and can update them from time to time in case it changes until you get a static IP.
The address of the latest decktape.io is 35.187.10.149 if you'd like to point DNS at it. This should be static now (if I understand what the google cloud is doing).
I've just tried it and it works just fine. Thanks @abingham - a handy alternative to running DeckTape wiht Docker.
@astefanutti I would be useful to mention it in README when available as decktape.io.
@m1guelpf I'll plan working on this. It may take a different shape though.
@astefanutti Do you have a timeline to release? I am building a new project that needs this right now...
@m1guelpf I don't have any timeline. I except it to be a substantial piece of work so it'd be better not making any assumption on its availability.
