Task #
I need to generate attendance lists on a regular basis, with some variable content (users, name of the gig, date, etc.). It needs to be easy enough to use for anyone; but ui as such is not that important. Also security is not much of an issue (no data stored), basically lambda-like solution should be enough.
Attempts #
1: mailing stuff #
First idea: build a service that waits for an email with specific keyword, generates pdf file based on the content, and sends it back to the sender.
2: fastapi app hosted on vps #
This was better in terms of ease of setup, but I had some issues using pico.sh to forward the ports from vps. It wasn't reliable, and then I found dbos mentioned on hackernews, which resulted in
Final solution #
Settled on using dbos.dev cloud, mainly for the free tier. It allows for one free app, and is more than I currently need
Technicalities #
fpdf and fpdf2 #
Wasted some hours on encoding issues with fpdf for python (didn't work well with polish characters, insisted on using latin-1 encoding). Solution was an upgrade (learned about pip uninstall on this occasion) to fpdf2, which in my case was a drop-in replacement and handles utf-8 nicely.