AbBOT-api Overview

This project is used to generate anonymous randomized data and serve it up via a RESTful API to other AbBOT projects.

Usage

Customization

Environment Variables

Customization of the API and how it runs can be done through the following environment variables.

Name	Acceptable Values	Default
MODEL_NAME	str one of "gpt2", "4chan"	"gpt2"
API_BATCH_SIZE	int greater than 0	5
ALLOWED_APIS	List[str] (comma separated list or asterisk)	"*"
API_HOST	str IP address	"0.0.0.0"
API_PORT	int port number	5000

• MODEL_NAME determines which model to use for generation of random text used by the APIs. Warning: The 4Chan option is NSFW and should be used with caution.
• API_BATCH_SIZE determines how many entries to generate from the model and put into the queue while the APIs are waiting for requests.
• ALLOWED_APIS determines which API paths will be loaded. For example, if the file was api/generators/prolifewhistleblower.py way I would load the APIs for only this one would be ALLOWED_APIS="prolifewhistleblower"
• API_HOST determines which interfaces to host the REST API on.
• API_PORT determines which TCP port to host the REST API on.

If you're not sure how to set environment variables in your environment, check out these guides and documentation:

• Set environment variables - Docker (Docker documentation)
• Environment variable assignment - Unix (Wikipedia)
• Enviornment variable assignment - Windows (Wikipedia)

Usage with Docker

First, build the docker image.

docker image build -t dev-abbot-model .

After that, start the inference engine.

# Normal
docker container run -p 5000:5000 --rm dev-abbot-model

# Specify environment variables
docker container run -e MODEL_NAME='gpt2' -e API_BATCH_SIZE='5' -e ALLOWED_APIS='*' -e API_PORT='8080' -p 8080:8080 --rm dev-abbot-model

After the container starts up, you're ready to go.

Usage with Python 3

Install Python

If you don't already have Python installed, you can check out the Python Beginner's Guide's instructions for installation.

After you have Python installed, make sure you have Pip installed by running the following command.

pip3 --version
# or
python3 -m pip --version
# or
python3 -m ensurepip --default-pip

If you don't have Pip installed, you can download the get-pip.py script and run it with python3.

curl 'https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py' -o ./get-pip.py
python3 ./get-pip.py

Installing dependencies

First we'll need to install Pipenv.

pip3 install --user pipenv

Then we can use pipenv to install all of the dependencies of this project.

pipenv install

Running the program

Before we can run the program, there's one script we need to run to download some runtime dependencies.

python3 ./download_weights.py

Now that all dependencies are installed and downloaded you can run the program (main.py) and set environment variables as you wish.

# Normal
python3 ./main.py
# or make it executable (Unix/Linux/macOS only)
chmod +x ./main.py
./main.py

# Specify environment variables (Bourne shell and related shells)
MODEL_NAME='gpt2' -e API_BATCH_SIZE='5' -e ALLOWED_APIS='*' API_PORT='8080' python3 ./main.py
# or set environment variables for whole session
export MODEL_NAME='gpt2' -e API_BATCH_SIZE='5' -e ALLOWED_APIS='*' API_PORT='8080'
python3 ./main.py

Testing the API

You can test the API with a simple curl command. If you add -i you can also see the headers. Bear in mind that the text generation models will take several minutes to start up and fill up the queues.

curl http://localhost:5000/prolifewhistleblower/anonymous-form

Expected output format

Successful requests

The data will be sent back through the response body as JSON. This JSON is generated directly by each API point individually so the format will vary between API paths. For example, the following output is the output of the curl -i http://localhost:5000/prolifewhistleblower/anonymous-form command.

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 624
Server: Werkzeug/2.0.1 Python/3.9.6
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 22:41:18 GMT

{
  "violation": "Dear Gov. Abbott, if you want a new bill to be read at all, we're getting it. It's all very well but now we have a bill that can't be read.\"\n\nMr. Abbott said he was happy that the measure that he introduced had passed.\n\n\"This would have been a much better bill,\" he said.\n\nWrite to John F. Stokes at [email protected] and David L. Bock at [email protected]",
  "obtained_evidence_from": "His wife told me",
  "clinic_or_doctor": "Dr. Trevor Hernandez",
  "city": "Aquilla",
  "state": "Texas",
  "zip_code": "76622",
  "county": "Hill",
  "ip_address": "67.10.46.59",
  "elected_to_public_office": "no"
}

An internal server error occurred

Currently the only error handling we have for issues with the API itself is an HTTP 500 catch-all. It will extract the error message from the actual error that occurred on the server and put it into a JSON object as message.

HTTP/1.0 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 24
Server: Werkzeug/2.0.1 Python/3.9.6
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 22:57:01 GMT

{
  "message": "<Error message here>"
}

404 API path not found

This one is pretty self-explanatory.

HTTP/1.0 404 NOT FOUND
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 53
Server: Werkzeug/2.0.1 Python/3.9.6
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 23:03:46 GMT

{
  "message": "The requested API path does not exist."
}

Attribution

• Texas ZIP code data was obtained from World Population Review.

Contributing

TODO: add instructions on how to contribute.

Formatting

Before committing your code each time, please format your code with yapf. If you think the style should be different, please open an issue or PR about the .style.yapf file. VS Code can be configured to use yapf and so can other editors. If you do not have an editor with automatic formatting that supports yapf, you can use yapf directly with yapf -ri ..