Fire and Forget

A simple daemon for storing generic actions and storing them in MongoDB tables. It uses UDP so that the application sending the data has very little overhead. It can literally toss actions into the wind and this daemon will try it's best to pick them up and store them for later retrieval.

Reasoning

We needed a way to store user interactions on our website, tied to particular users. While statsd is great for metrics and anonymous data, it didn't help us for this more targeted data. This little app copies the idea, while making it domain specific.

How it Works

Send a JSON message to the open UDP socket that Fire and Forget opens. The message should have the following format:

{
  objectType: 'modelName',
  objectId: 1,
  objectDetails: { nestedJSON },
  action: 'thing',
  actionDetails: { nestedJSON }
}

The objectType will have 'fnf-' prepended to it and used as the collection name. All of the other fields will be inserted as a new record into that collection as given.

Passphrases

Optionally, you can require a passphrase for every action that's sent to the daemon. This passphrase can be set in the server (via the -k command line option), and also must be added to the "passphrase" key of every JSON action sent.

Installation

• Install node.js

• npm install

• Start the daemon

  node fire-and-forget

Help

Use fire-and-forget --help to see the various options.