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Huxley 2 Community Edition

A cross-platform JSON proxy for the GB railway Live Departure Boards SOAP API

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Note: Huxley 2 is considered feature-complete and will only be updated to fix bugs or move to a new .NET LTS version.

About

Huxley 2 is a CORS enabled cross-platform JSON ReST proxy for the GB NRE LDB WCF SOAP XML API (called Darwin). It supports both the Public Version (PV) and the Staff Version (SV). It's built with ASP.NET Core LTS (.NET 8.0), C# 10 and lots of abbreviations!

The primary purpose of Huxley 2 is to allow easy use of the LDB API from browser-based client-side PWAs made with JavaScript or TypeScript. Additionally, it opens up the Windows enterprise API to agile developers on macOS and Linux.

Get Started

Check out the live demo server for API documentation and to give it a try.

The demo server comes with zero guarantees of uptime. It can (and regularly does) go down or break.

Get Your Own

There are detailed instructions on how to host your own instance on Azure in this blog post.

Running with Docker

  1. Ensure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed
  2. Create an .env file in the Huxley2 directory with the access tokens. You can delete the ones you're not using.
  3. Run docker-compose up
  4. The app should be available at localhost:8081

Example .env file:

ACCESS_TOKEN=abcde12345
STAFF_ACCESS_TOKEN=abcde12345
CLIENT_ACCESS_TOKEN=abcde12345

To rebuild use docker-compose build or docker-compose up --build.

If you want to run the container in the background you can run docker-compose up --detach

If you would like the docker container to reboot upon restart on the host machine you can uncomment restart: always in the docker-compose.yml file and make sure the docker service is set to start upon bootup.

Station Codes File

If you need to regenerate the station codes CSV file in this repo then you can do so easily with jq (and curl) using an instance that has access to the staff API (and has been restarted recently). On Linux, you can install simply with your package manager, e.g. sudo apt install jq (on Ubuntu/Debian).

For example, using the Huxley 2 demo instance you can run this one-liner:

curl --silent https://huxley2.azurewebsites.net/crs | jq -r '(.[0] | keys_unsorted) as $keys | $keys, map([.[ $keys[] ]])[] | @csv' > station_codes.csv

If using a local server with a self-signed certificate:

curl --silent --insecure https://localhost:5001/crs | jq -r '(.[0] | keys_unsorted) as $keys | $keys, map([.[ $keys[] ]])[] | @csv' > station_codes.csv

If you regenerated the station codes CSV file on your own instance, change StationCodesCsvUrl in Huxley2/appsettings.json to the location of your CSV file.

License

Licensed under the EUPL-1.2-or-later.

The EUPL covers distribution through a network or SaaS (like a compatible and interoperable AGPL).