Pollinator 3000

A light, fast and user-friendly server application for polls, surveys, ballots etc.

Written in Rust, HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Uses Sqlite3 for data storage.

A testing instance of this application is hosted here

Goals:

• Not requiring users to create accounts, confirm emails etc.
• Self-hostable with minimal effort
• Understandable for inexperienced users
• Able to create more advanced types of polls
• Powerful REST API for scripts and automation
• Good documentation
• Accessible webpage design

Usage

Creating the database

In the db/ folder or anywhere the server has access to, enter

sqlite3 main.db < db.sql

This will create a database called main.db from a template stored in db. sql.

Running the server

Simply run the server (cargo run or run the compiled binary). By default, it will look for a database in db/main.db.

For help on commandline arguments, run the server with a help argument:

USAGE: poll (DATABASE_PATH) (BIND_ADDRESS)
The default DATABASE_PATH is ./db/main.db
The default BIND_ADDRESS is 0.0.0.0:8080.

Environmental variables

Some functionality of the server can be altered by setting specific environmental variables:

• POLL_ADMIN_TOKEN - A "password" for the website administrator. When set, it enables the administration webpage {website}/admin.
• POLL_CREATE_LIMIT - The amount of time (in seconds) that a single IP address has to wait between poll creation requests.
• POLL_VOTE_LIMIT - The amount of time (in seconds) that a single IP address has to wait between voting requests on a single poll.
• POLL_CLEANUP_INTERVAL - The amount of time (in seconds) between runs of a thread responsible for cleaning up old IP limits (a sort of garbage collector).

REST API

For each endpoint's API arguments, see it's handler function's documentation.

API Example

Type: cargo doc --open, navigate to the handler function (example: handle_create_desc) and read its doc comment:

Handles complete poll creation requests
Params:
 - name: Poll name (String)
 - type: PollType enum variant, see PollType::try_parse for parsing format
 - data: To be parsed as a PollFormat trait object, see the corresponding
   PollType::from_data function for the proper format

Then, send an HTTP POST request to that endpoint with your data.