We traded blogs for black boxes, now we're paying for it (tekhne.dev)

I built pbar.io because I was tired of SSH'ing into servers to check if my data processing scripts were still running, or worse, having them finish/crash without knowing.

It's a simple REST API that lets you create and update progress bars from anywhere. The same progress bar can be viewed as terminal output (with ANSI colors), in a browser, or consumed as JSON.

I'm actually tracking this HN discussion with pbar. The progress bar increases with each comment - watch it live as we discuss!

Web: https://pbar.io/Y8yg3BG Terminal: curl https://pbar.io/api/bars/Y8yg3BG

More features that emerged from my own use cases: - Hierarchical progress bars (parent bars auto-aggregate children) - Python package (pip install pbar-io) that wraps tqdm - just swap the import - QR codes to monitor progress on your phone while away from desk - No auth required for quick prototypes

Curious what use cases you might have for this!

Comments (6)

roadbuster · 1h ago

What does the backend architecture look like? Heavily distributed, or everything in-memory on a single address space server? How do you handle users writing tight loops which fetch the endpoint in rapid fire?

clav88 · 52m ago

It's a Next.js app currently deployed on vercel with a Postgres DB running on supabase. Both are fairly scalable, but not in an optimal way in terms of costs. I'd either have to introduce a Pro pricing plan or get some donations from sponsors. The simple nature of the API would allow to heavily distribute this though, i.e. one could simply shard by progress bar.

Regarding the tight loops: Currently there is just basic rate limiting in place and the Python client batches updates by default. The app is not intended for short-lived progress bars with fast updates. These usually also don't have a good reason to be shared and live on the web. It's really much more useful for slowly updating, long running processes.

mathfailure · 1h ago

I got "Error Progress bar not found" visiting your https://pbar.io/Y8yg3BG link. However, there are no comments yet, so that might explain it. So this is a service you provide.

I must admit that idea behind this project is nice, but I'm not going to get dependent on someone else's infrastructure (and I think I'm not the only one thinking that way), can I host it myself or is the source not available? I don't see any links to sources or github, so decided to just ask here (and to also make the 1st comment here to see if your link would work now).

clav88 · 1h ago

Thanks for trying it! The link works for me. The progress bar shows 1% now that there's 1 comment and should update to 2% after my reply ;)

I'm happy to clean up the source a bit and put it on GitHub if people like it and prefer to host it themselves. I thought I'd host it myself under a short, memorable domain, so people can easily try it out and share short links to their progress bars.

mathfailure · 1h ago

Oh, it was an error on my side, the link actually works.

If you are happy to share the code - I think quite some people would be happy. The openness doesn't guarantee, but usually leads to better security, performance, etc.

It is very nice of you to provide such a service (and for free, as I see), but your docs says we, users, better not update stuff faster than once per second and that's quite a big limitation for some big companies with lots of processes to track (which probably can't be grouped together into a single batch update as your docs suggest to do).

clav88 · 47m ago

Yes, definitely. The service could easily be scaled and rate limits can be increased if users are willing to pay for. Self-hosting is a good alternative, as you already suggested.

I'll work on cleaning up the code, adding some dev documentation and releasing it on GitHub when I find some time. Perhaps this weekend already!