All Growstuff is built arround the server application. The application is built in Node.js and hase 3 utilities :
First of all install node and install the dependences with npm install. You'll need to create a Twitter application to stream the tweet in real-time on Twitter ( be sure to set the application path to http://localhost on the Developer Panel ). Add create another application on Dropbox to store the photos, once it's ok generate a long living access token.
Before running the server, export the app configuration in the console.
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY= ...
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET= ...
export DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN= ...
And finally start the server: grunt. The frontend is finally accessible on the http://localhost:3000.
The application can be easily deployed for free on Heroku. The application need a MongoHQ plugin to start.
Don't forget to override the
TWITTER_CALLBACK_URL!
Growstuff server process each tweet containning the hashtah #growstuff, thanks to the Twitter streamer. You can avoid to process a certain hashtag becaus of the quantity of tweet to process if you don't reduce your scope.
This worker run on the same process as the web server.
Because we need to discuss on both direction with the differents plants, 3 options were possibles to discuss with each plants :
However we wanted our application to be real-time and to avoid the server overload, we agreed to choose the socket choice. The plant worker run on socketIO. Furthermore the socket allow us to know if the plant is really connected or not.