Automatic Music Calendar

Automatic Music Calendar (AMC) is a MERN app (MongoDb, Express, React, NodeJS) built to collect, organize, and present an always-up-to-date schedule of upcoming local live music events. While I wrote this app originally to serve the Charleston, South Carolina music scene, AMC was flexibly designed to be open source, and pluggable with any source sites. To do so, simply fork the project, and update it with minimal config options and your custom scraper files. By setting up a recurring job to run the web scraping , you can source your event data from any set of websites you want and expect that your app's event data is always up to date.

Installation

AMC requires a running instance of MongoDB. Mongo setup is outside the scope of this guide, but connection details can be found in the .env file at the project root. Once variables are setup, AMC is ready to run out of the box. It comes packaged with default scrapers which pull data from several Charleston, SC music venues. If you would like to pull event from different sources, simply add or remove scrapers from the /scrapers directory. Instructions on how to write a custom scraper can be found below. Once satisfied, you can start the app by running these commands from your terminal.

Clone the repo to your local machine

$   git clone https://github.com/TheRyanMiller/AutomaticMusicCalendar.git

Change into the project directory and install the server-side NPM packages, and then the client-side NPM packages.

$   cd AutomaticMusicCalendar
$   npm install
$   cd client
$   npm install

Issue this command from the /client directory to launch the app locally

$   npm run

Configuration

Firebase Authentication

By default, AMC uses Firebase to offer users the ability to login via Facebook and Google. If you intend to allow logins, you will need to setup a Firebase account and project. See here for details.

Server Environment Variables

Create an .env file at the project root, and set the following variables. An example file has been provided ./envExample.

MONGO_URL_DEV=[MongoDB connection string] e.g. mongodb://localhost:27017/chslivemusic
API_PORT=3001

Client Environment Variables

REACT_APP_FIREBASE_API_KEY=[Your Personal Firebase API Key]
REACT_APP_FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN=[Your personal Firebas Auth Domain]
REACT_APP_PROJECT_ID=[Firebase Project ID]
REACT_APP_API=[Your AMC Server API] e.g. localhost:3001/api

Custom Scrapers

Several scrapers come packaged in this repository by default

1. They Royal American
2. The Pour House
3. The Music Farm
4. Tin Roof

Even if you choose not to use these specific scrapers, they may still prove useful to you as examples of how to write your own. Each event event item can contain the following properties:

_id String. Unique event identifier.
title String. Title of event, typically the headline act
openers String. Single string list of opening acts.
infoLink String. Direct link to event on source site
fee String. Price of admission or cover charge
showUrl String. URL to event
location String. Location of event - string
doorsTime String. Time of doors (e.g. "7pm").
showTime String. Time of show (e.g. "8pm").
time Date. Time of event
locAcronym String. Location acronymn identifier associated with event location
ticketLink String. Ticket Link. updateDate Date. Current date (new Date())