Robot Cloud Server

The purpose of this code is to run in the "cloud" on a server, such as on a Digital Ocean droplet in order to facilitate the communication between the robot on a network that is either private, or simply unstable.

Features:

Accept incoming messages and relay them to robot when it comes online.
Provide a consistent web interface URL that will redirect to the robot's current IP address.
Provide ability to get IP and Host names for adding to /etc/hosts

This is more of a personal one off thing than code that anyone might use. It is a reasonably good example of a cloud Socket.io server with the ability to store and forward messages though. If you are using ArloBot, and need a way to communicate with it or find it on a network, message me, and I will see if I can help you get this running.

Setup and Run

Prerequisites.

Node.js

I suggest using the latest LTS, and I suggest using nvm to install it.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.2/install.sh | bash
nvm install node --latest-npm
nvm use node
nvm alias default node

Setup and run RobotWebService

Configuration File

cd
mkdir .robotWebService

Create a file called ~/.robotWebService/config.json with the following contents:

{
  "cloudServer": {
    "password": "superSecret1234",
    "sessionSecret": "RandomStringForSessionID"
  }
}

Test run

npm ci
node index.js

PM2

The expected way to run this is to use PM2 to run it continuously.

./startpm2.sh

Cron job

You probably want this to just run on your cloud server 24x7, so it should start in cron.

Add something like this to your crontab:
@reboot /home/chrisl8/RobotWebService/startpm2.sh

Be sure to replace my home folder with your home directory.

chrisl8 / RobotWebService