Festival ticket ordering system

Work in Progress!

Festival booking systems are known to crash on ticket sale launch (Green Man, End of the Road, Bangface). This is an implementation that can survive high load!

Requirements:

• Runs on a single machine
• Can handle thousands of requests per second
• Launch countdown
• Stores state in database
• Multiple room types
• Multiple durations (3 or 4 days)
• Payment portal
• Add to cart -> Checkout -> Payment
• Simple front-end

Tech stack

• Tonic/gRPC
• Postgres

Dev setup

Install sqlx cli;

$ cargo install sqlx-cli

In one terminal:

$ docker compose up

In another:

$ cp template.env .env
$ cargo run

Frontend

Install protoc-gen-js:

$ npm install -g protoc-gen-js

Download protoc-gen-grpc-web, make it executable and available on your PATH: Releases

To generate a new client after updating the gRPC spec, run:

$ just gen-client

To serve the frontend, run:

$ just serve-client

Notes

Roughly following the architecture of Stripe, the flow of the payment system would be as follows:

• Once the order is completed, the user is directed to a payment page hosted by the payment provider
• On success or failure, the user is directed to a success/failure page
• Stripe calls a webhook on our app, the order is marked as success/failure, and an email is sent out

This part of the application could be entirely separated from the load-bearing new-user facing purchase API