README: webapi-eca

A Modular ECA Engine Server which acts as a middleware between WebAPI's.

The server is started through the webapi-eca.js module by calling node js/webapi-eca.js. An alternative ( e.g. for development ) is to use the supported build system gulp by executing gulp start, which will start the server and restart it whenever relevant files change.

Getting started

Prerequisites:

• node.js (v5.5.0) and npm (v3.6.0) (find it here). Be sure you have at least these versions installed or otherwise some packages might fail to install.
• Running PostgreSQL (update config/system.json)
• Running Firebase (update config/system.json)
• (optional) Gulp if you want to use the implemented build tool: `sudo npm install -g gulp
• (optional) Pygments if you want to generate the doc: sudo apt-get install python-setuptools and then sudo easy_install Pygments
• (optional) CoffeeScript, if you want to develop and compile from coffee sources: sudo npm -g install coffee-script

Clone project:

git clone https://github.com/dominicbosch/webapi-eca.git

Download and install dependencies:

cd webapi-eca
npm install

In case you receive an error containing WARN This failure might be due to the use of legacy binary "node", try to solve it with nodejs-legacy:

sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy

Edit the system's configuration file:

vi config/system.json

Apply your settings, for example (default values listed below):

{
    "httpport": 8080,                   # port on which the system listens for requests
    "db": {                             # main DB configuration
        "module": "postgres",           # DB module to be used from the folder 'persistence'
        "host": "localhost",            # host where the DB resides
        "port": 5432,                   # port the DB listens on
        "db": "webapi-eca",             # DB name
        "user": "[postgres-user]",      # DB username
        "pass": "[postgres-password]"   # DB password
    },
    "firebase": {                       # Firebase is used to monitor the user processes
        "app": "https://[your-app].firebaseio.com/",
        "token": "[super-secret-string-goes-here]"
    },
    "mode": "development",              # Safe haven, No crash and burn
    "log": {
        "stdlevel": "info",             # the log-level for the std I/O stream
        "filelevel": "info",            # the log-level for the log file
        "filepath": "logs/server.log",  # log file path, relative to cwd
        "trace": "off",                  # if set to productive no expensive origin lookup is performed and logged
        "nolog": "true"                 # Remove this flag if you want to have a log
    },
    "keygenpp": "[TODO this has to come from prompt when server is started!]"
}

Start the server:

gulp start

Congratulations, your own WebAPI based ECA engine server is now up and running!

Use Gulp

We used gulp as a building tool, hence you can just execute gulp in the root folder of this project (if you installed it...) and it will display all available gulp commands to you.

The most relevant command for development will be:

gulp develop --watch

This will start the system with a monitoring system (nodemon) and restart it whenever core files change. It will also watch for all the client side files and deploy them to the server whenever they change.