Development Setup

Prerequisites: Install VirtualBox and Vagrant.

1. Create a file config/config.json, with this content (make sure you never commit this file; the .gitignore should automatically prevent it, but please be aware of the potential to accidentally throw your credentials out on to the open web).

{
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "emailPassword": "changeme",
  "smtpHost": "mailgate.eng.utah.edu",
  "influxdbUsername": "admin",
  "influxdbPassword": "changeme",
  "host": "http://air.eng.utah.edu"
}

Some details about each of these settings:

• email: A secure email address that you own (this address will be used to send out user authentication credentials)
• emailPassword: The password for that email address
• smtpHost: The SMTP server for that email address
• influxdbUsername: A username to administer the influxDB database (this will be created by the setup script; choose whatever username and password you wish)
• influxdbPassword: A password for that account
• host: The address of the server where this is being deployed (if setting up in Vagrant, use "http://localhost", otherwise, use the public name, e.g. "http://air.eng.utah.edu")

2. Once you've created config.json, type vagrant up; it will set up and start a virtual machine that should be identical to the deployed server (plus any of your changes).

You should be able to access the web interface (use localhost:7080 if you're running in Vagrant, otherwise, it will be served on port 80), and the influxdb API interface (port 8083).

Notes:

• To sync changes that you make to the vagrant VM, run vagrant rsync-auto in this directory; it will watch for changes and propagate them to the VM. To access the VM's command line, type vagrant ssh; inside the VM, this directory is synced to /vagrant. I've noticed some irregularities with syncing shared folders / forwarded ports: vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest may help if you encounter these issues.
• If you want to work on the web server, it's probably easiest to halt the system daemon: (from inside the VM:) sudo systemctl stop web and start it directly on the console: sudo -u web; cd /vagrant/web; node app.js.
  • If, instead, you just want to monitor the process, the log files in /home/web should be helpful (feel free to delete them if they get large).
• Similarly, if you want to work on the script that polls data periodically, you'll want to halt the cron daemon: sudo systemctl stop cron and run the script directly: sudo -u poller; cd /vagrant/poll; python poll.py
  • These log files are stored in /home/poller (feel free to trash them as well)

Deployment

This server is designed to work on a fresh Debian system (though it very well could work on other systems). To set up the server, clone the repository somewhere (currently, the air.eng.utah.edu is stored in an airu user directory), create the config/config.json the same as the Development Setup, and then run bash deploy.sh as root.