Quote of the Day API

A secure, rate‑limited microservice serving curated jokes and quotes from a persistent SQLite database. Built for fun, engineered for production.

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📖 Overview

Quote of the Day is a small but production-minded API designed to demonstrate:

• Rate limiting – flask-limiter enforces per‑IP request caps to prevent abuse.
• Persistent storage – SQLite replaces JSON to ensure atomic reads/writes and avoid race conditions under concurrent access.
• Proxy awareness – ProxyFix middleware ensures correct client IP logging behind reverse proxies.
• Organic usage – The live API has been discovered and now serves hundreds of requests daily.

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✨ Features

• Randomized quote delivery with delivery count tracking
• Plain text and JSON endpoints
• Rate-limited access to prevent abuse
• Systemd-ready deployment with Gunicorn
• SQLite-backed persistence for safe concurrent access

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🗂 Architecture

[ Client ]
   |
   v
[ Flask + Gunicorn ]
   |
   v
[ SQLite DB (quotes.db) ]

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🚀 Endpoints

Method	Path	Description	Rate Limit
GET	/	HTML frontend (quotes.html)	N/A
GET	/quote	Returns a random quote as plain text	20/minute
GET	/api/quote	Returns a random quote as JSON	50/minute

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📦 Running Locally

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/patrickbeane/quote-of-the-day.git
cd quote-of-the-day

# (Optional) Create a virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Edit `add-quotes.py` with your favorite quotes
nano add-quotes.py

# Run `add-quotes.py` to generate the DB
python add-quotes.py

# Run the API
python quotes.py

Visit http://<your-server-ip>:5051 for the HTML frontend or http://<your-server-ip>:5051/api/quote for JSON output.

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📝 Example Output

{
  "id": 1,
  "quote": "Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.",
  "author": "Albert Einstein",
  "delivered": 3
}

🛠 Deployment with systemd

For production use, this service can be run behind Gunicorn and managed via systemd.

A sample unit file is included in deploy/quotes.service:

sudo cp deploy/quotes.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
sudo systemctl enable quotes
sudo systemctl start quotes

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🔒 Production Considerations

• Rate limiting prevents abuse and keeps the service responsive.
• SQLite ensures atomic writes and safe concurrent access.
• ProxyFix ensures accurate IP logging behind reverse proxies.

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🏗 Production Deployment (on my infra)

[ Client ]
   |
   v
[ Hermes (Docker + Caddy) ]
   |
   v
[ Hades (Flask + Gunicorn) ]
   |
   v
[ SQLite DB (quotes.db) ]

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📊 Fun Fact

The live API has been hit by automated clients and bots, resulting in some quotes being "delivered" hundreds of times - a real‑world example of why rate limiting and logging matter.

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📜 License

MIT License – free to use, modify, and share.