QuickStart with Local Deployment

Installation

1. Install Node.js. (We use Node 8 these days.)
2. Install PostgreSQL. Be sure to read the “PostgreSQL One Click Installer README” and follow the instructions there to adjust your shared memory as needed. (We use Postgres 10 these days.)
3. Install Redis. (We use Redis 3 these days.)
4. Clone this git repository.
5. Run cd refocus.
6. Create a new branch: git checkout -b <your branch name> master
7. Run npm install. This downloads and installs project dependencies and executes the post-install steps. Note: don’t run this with sudo! You may get some weird errors later.
8. Install lunchy (brew install Caskroom/cask/lunchy). This will help you start redis.
9. Run lunchy start redis to start redis.
10. Run npm start to start your Node.js server at http://localhost:3000.
11. Log in with username “admin@refocus.admin” and password “devPassword”.
12. If you want to run the sample timeout check in a separate background process:
    1. Start the server with environment variable (i.e. config setting) ENABLE_CLOCK_PROCESS set to true.
    2. Run npm run start-clock to start the clock process.
13. If you want to offload expensive work from your web process to separate worker process:
    1. Start the server with environment variable (i.e. config setting) ENABLE_WORKER_PROCESS set to true.
    2. Run npm run start-worker to start the worker process.
14. If you intend to deploy this on heroku and have heroku toolbelt installed, run heroku local to start the web, clock and worker processes all together. Make sure that the ENABLE_CLOCK_PROCESS and ENABLE_WORKER_PROCESS environment variables are set to true. Note that the node server will be listening on port 5000 when you start it using the heroku local command.

Updates

Whenever you pull down a new version of Refocus from the git repository:

1. Run npm update to make sure you have all the latest dependencies.
2. Run npm start to start your Node.js server at http://localhost:3000.

Setup Production Environment on Localhost

If not already setup, follow Installation instructions to setup Refocus. Execute the following commands to setup production environment and corresponding config variables:

export NODE_ENV=production
export DATABASE_URL='postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/focusdb'
npm start

Usage

TODO

How redis is used

On node server startup, two redis clients are instantiated: The publisher is called by the sequelize ORM when a subject or sample is inserted/updated/deleted. It publishes a serialized object keyed by the record type (i.e. subject or sample) and containing the object which was inserted/updated/deleted. The subscriber parses the message string into an object then uses socket.io to broadcast the changes out to any connected browser clients. After installing the server, you can run redis-cli to issue commands to redis server. Command to show active channels is: PUBSUB CHANNELS *