👋 Here
This app was first presented at the DEPT x Node.js talk I gave on June 18th 2021. It was designed to demonstrate the usage of Socket.io, and really just show how fast it was to do something really quick and easy. Overall, it took me a couple of hours to complete the version I gave at the talk (which, for posterity, can always be found at the SHA f8dd7a4).
The /client directory contains a create-react-app-based SPA that displays the map. The /server folder contains an Express app that also serves Socket.io connections. I just copy and pasted a lot of the boilerplate from some of the other code I wrote in the past.
What does it do?
When you land on the webpage, it asks for permission to access your location. If you say yes, it'll drop a pin on the map at your current location. If other people visit the same webpage after you, then you'll see their locations get added to the map in real-time. That's it, super simple.
Redis is used as in-memory location storage. I didn't want to keep location data around forever, so it was important to have volatile storage so I could just turn it off when I was done and have all the data be gone. Locations are stored as JSON strings in a set.
Development
Installation
As this project uses npm workspaces, this project requires at least npm@7.
To install the dependencies:
npm installYou'll also need to be running Redis locally. You can also optionally supply a custom URL to a Redis instance by assigning a valid URL to the REDIS_URL environment variable.
You can then run the following to start the compiler in watch mode. This watches both /client and /server for changes, restarting both when one is detected. It also
npm run build:watchYou can also build the library without watching the directory:
npm run buildVersion management configuration is provided for volta.