Slow Python Script and Using Pipenv with AWS Lambda

| programming | python | aws |

I’m working on improving a python script I wrote to get a list of old posts from a wordpress website. Basically I want to be able to see what post I wrote X years ago on this day for any wordpress site.

This script uses the wonderful requests library and the very powerful public Wordpress API.

I am also using pipenv for the first time and its wonderful. I wish I started using this tool years ago.

What it Does Right Now

  1. Takes a dictionary of sites and iterates over each one
  2. Prints out to the console
print("1 year ago I wrote about {0} {1}".format(p['title']['rendered'], p['link']))
if years_ago > 1:
print("{0} years ago I wrote about {1} {2}".format(years_ago, p['title']['rendered'], p['link']))

The Script is Super Slow

You can time how long a script takes on OS X using the time command. 
Levs-iMac:OldPosts levlaz$ time python old_posts.py
1 year ago I wrote about Thoughts on “Sacramento Renaissance” https://tralev.net/thoughts-on-sacramento-renaissance/

real	0m11.192s
user	0m0.589s
sys	0m0.060s

I know why its slow. Because I have like 6 for loops and a bunch of other inneficiencies. In addition, the requests are not cached anywhere so it has to get the entire JSON load each time that the script runs.

Plans for Optimization

  1. Use Redis (or something) to cache the results.
  2. Get rid of some of the for loops if we can.

Plans for Usage

  1. Deploy to AWS (Labmda?)
  2. Have this run on a Cron Job every day (using CloudWatch)

Plans for Additional Features

I want to share all of the posts from that day on social media. Instead of plugging in all of the various accounts that I need I am planning on using the Buffer API to post everywhere at once and queue up posts so that it does not fire off a bunch of stuff at the same time in the event that there are many posts for that day.

This will involve doing some sort of Outh dance because I don’t think that Buffer offers using personal access tokens.

I'll Just Use Lambda

Famous last words.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, but when you are using the amazing pipenv tool you have to go track down where the site-packages are located and zip them up in order to ship your code to AWS Lambda.

Unsurprisingly someone opened a feature request for this, but the solution in the comments works just fine.

I wrote a little bash script that is being called through a Makefile to zip up the site-packages along with the core python code in preparation to ship it off to AWS Lambda.

Bash Script to Zip Up Site-Packages

SITE_PACKAGES=$(pipenv --venv)/lib/python3.6/site-packages
DIR=$(pwd)


  Make sure pipenv is good to go
  
    
      
      
    
  



pipenv install


cd $SITE_PACKAGES
zip -r9 $DIR/OldPosts.zip *


cd $DIR
zip -g OldPosts.zip old_posts.py

Makefile

.PHONY: package

package:
sh package.sh

This should just work™.

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