The loftili api is the "center-piece" of the loftili platform. It is responsible for maintaining all persistant platform data as well as acting as the bridge between the core and ui/ios clients. The api is built off the sailsjs mvc framework, but has parted from the framework in several areas:

1. controllers return only json data (with other formats in the backlog) - no ejs or html views
2. configuration using dotenv instead of the local.js configuration file mentioned in the documentation
3. disabled default/blueprint routes. this was done to give api development more control over the business logic needed in the controllers.

Getting up and running

In order to start developing locally, you will need to take care of a few pre-requisites:

1. install node and redis

Our production server runs node v0.10.33 and redis v2.8.21. Node is our application's runtime and redis is used for session management as well as the mangement of track order in our streams.

note for redis: you do not actually need to install redis as a daemon on your system; simply running redis-server will open up the server in the foreground.

You will also need a mysql server, which is used by the application to store all user, artist, track and other persistant information.

2. clone the repository and install packages

At this point you should be able to execute both the npm and node binaries from your terminal. npm is the node packagement management tool, similar to what ruby gems is to ruby. With npm, you should now install the necessary packages:

$ git clone git@github.com:loftili/api.git
$ cd ./api
$ npm install

3. prepare .env file

Instead of managing multiple environment files, context-specific configuration information is stored in a .env file which is then loaded in via dotenv. You can see this happeneing in the connections.js configuration file:

var dotenv = require('dotenv');

module.exports.connections = (function() {

  if(!process.env['A2DBHN'])
    dotenv.load();

  return {

    a2_db: {
      adapter: 'sails-mysql',
      host: process.env['A2DBHN'],
      user: process.env['A2DBUN'],
      password: process.env['A2DBPW'],
      database: process.env['A2DBDB']
    }

  };

})();

A complete example of a .env needed to run the loftili api can be seen here.

4. running the migrations

The api uses knex to handle it's database migratoions. After running the npm install command from step 2, you can find the knex executable under ./node_modules/.bin/knex. If you are unfamilar with this command line tool, you can view the help information by running ./node_modules/.bin/knex --help:

$ ./node_modules/.bin/knex --help

  Usage: knex [options] [command]


  Commands:

    init [options]                         Create a fresh knexfile.
    migrate:make [options] <name>   Create a named migration file.
    migrate:latest                         Run all migrations that have not yet been run.
    migrate:rollback                       Rollback the last set of migrations performed.
    migrate:currentVersion                View the current version for the migration.

  Options:

    -h, --help         output usage information
    -V, --version      output the version number
    --debug            Run with debugging.
    --knexfile [path]  Specify the knexfile path.
    --cwd [path]       Specify the working directory.
    --env [name]       environment, default: process.NODE_ENV || development

So, in order to get your databse up to snuff, you will need to run:

$ ./node_modules/.bin/knex migrate:latest

This will take care of running though all the migrations in our migrations directory, applying each one at a time.

5. Running the application & using forever

With the environment configured, both redis/mysql available, and the migrations applied, it is time to run the application. This can be done two ways:

1. running the app.js file in the foreground:

   $ node ./app.js
   

2. using forever to run the application in the background:

   $ forever start -w ./app.js
   

We prefer using the second approach, as the w flag will watch the source code, refreshing the application each time a change is detected.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome, and anyone interested in contributing to LFTAPI should follow the guide published by github, and create an issue, or just fork the repository, make your change, and open a pull request.

License

Please see LICENSE.txt