Setup Instructions
The following are the setup instructions for the Ticket Auction Manager platform.
I attempted to make setup and use as simple as possible. But I am not a user experience professional, I had just made a few judgement calls in what I think would be the easiest way for most people to be able to setup.
Introduced in version 2.0, there is now an offline mode that it will use by default if there are no existing configurations.
To put simply, you just have to navigate to the latest release, download the latest .exe or .AppImage for your platform, open it; then it should work right out of the box.
If there is an existing configuration and you want to go back to offline mode, simply blank out the Base URL in settings, and click save. TAM should automatically revert to Offline mode as indicated at the bottom.
TAM -> Settings -> Prefix Manager: Is where you go to create, update, or remove prefixes. At least one prefix is required to enter any data.
To create, type in its name in the Prefix box. Then select the bootstyle you want the buttons to change to when selected, as demonstrated in the Showcase below. Then setting a sort order will dictate its order on the Main Menu dropdown.
Clicking Add/Update will add or update it on the database.
Then you should be able to go back to the Main Menu, click Refresh Prefixes, then the new prefixes should appear in the dropdown. If not, try closing TAM and reopening.
If you want to work with TAM in portable mode, then you can issue the following command before you start working with it. This will allow you to run TAM from a location like a flash drive or network share (even though I wouldn't recommend the latter), without having to reconfigure everything for each computer.
Linux (replace "tam-client" with the current name of your file):
./tam-client.AppImage makeportable
Windows (replace "tam-client" with the current name of your file):
.\tam-client.exe makeportable
So essentially all you have to do is run it in a terminal or command prompt with the "makeportable" argument.
To use more than one instance of TAM simultaneously at an event, one can elect to use online mode. Despite its name, online mode just means that the client is running its queries against a server instead of just locally.
Because I have no interest in potentially hosting a bunch of other people's data, I've opted to just throw the keys about persay when it comes to hosting servers.
So if you want to run your event completely airgapped and offline, you can do so. All you need is some sort of router, a computer that can run at least a basic distro like Debian, and some spare laptops. Internet is only needed for downloading the server components.
Or if you want to put it right out on the internet with your VPS of choice, that's your business. If you do it that way, I'd caution to use a very secure API_PW during the setup though.
Download and install Docker Engine using the instructions for your platform/Linux distro of choice.
Docker Engine install by distro
Download the latest tam-server....tar.gz file from the releases page, extract it to the location where you want its files to be (I'd recommend a directory in /var). If you're ssh'ing into your server you can use the following commands, which don't depend on any local GUI:
The first command references the current server file at the time I'm writing this, in the future you can navigate to the releases, find the server file on the latest release, right click on it, then copy link.
mkdir -p /var/tam
cd /var/tam
wget https://github.com/dbob16/tam-api/releases/download/v-2.0.0/tam-server-v2.0.tar.gz
tar xvzf tam-server-v2.0.tar.gz
./create_server.sh
Then follow the instructions. First few questions will ask about information to create a self-signed cert and key for https, and then the last few are for the server setup.
- API_PW: This question allows you to setup an API_PW (optional), which requires the same to be put into the corresponding dialog on the Settings dialog in the options, optional PC Name, and then click Generate API
- SS_MODE: Putting anything in for this question before pressing enter enables Super Secure mode. Super Secure mode pairs API keys to IP addresses if used on the local network which makes it more difficult for a malicious actor to duplicate your API key as they'd have to replicate your IP on the network as well.
If your server has a firewall, I'd recommend allowing ports 80 and 443, both tcp. Using the following if you have UFW (most common):
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
Now it's time to configure the clients.
First you have to get/retrieve the IP address of the server. I'd recommend just setting a DHCP IP reservation for the server, which can be done through the WebGUI of your router of choice. Reference the documentation for your make and model of router to learn to do this.
Once that is done, reboot the server and it should get the newly reserved IP. If you're using Super Secure mode, I'd recommend reserving DHCP IP's the clients too.
Now here comes the fun part.
Open TAM on each of the client computers, click the Settings button on the bottom, then in that dialog put in the following for the Base URL, replacing "ip" with your server's IP address:
https://ip/
If there wasn't an API_PW inputted during the server's setup, you can just click Save and the client should show up as Online afterwards.
If you provided an API_PW in your server's setup, you should put that in the API_PW box, then the optional Computer Name below that. Then clicking Generate API Key should return with "API Key Generated and Appended to Save" Below that. Then click save and your client should be online.
If you enabled Super Secure mode on your server while setting it up, the API key you just generated is only good on just that computer. So if you share config files, you just have to Generate another one by repeating the above paragraph on each client computer.
Then you should be all set.