n4m-socket-demo

This repository demonstrates how to use Node for Max to create a simple websockets application with express, socket.io, and a public URL via ngrok.

Be sure to also check out the examples in the official Cycling ’74 n4m-examples repository!

Set-up

1. Download this repository and open index.maxpat.

   # using the command line:
   git clone https://github.com/delucis/n4m-socket-demo.git
   cd n4m-socket-demo
   open index.maxpat

2. In Max, click the script npm install message button to install the dependencies for this repository. (You could also do this from the command line by running npm install in the repository directory).

3. Press script start to launch the web server and create a tunnel to ngrok.

4. Open your browser to http://0.0.0.0:3000 or the ngrok URL displayed on-screen

5. Try typing and sending messages using the browser interface. You should be able to receive them inside Max. Hooray! 🎉

Authenticating with ngrok

ngrok allows you to sign up and then authenticate your session using a secret token. It would be a bad idea to commit that to GitHub, because then everyone would see your secrets 😱

Instead, we can have our index.js code look for an “environment variable” (available as a property of the process.env global variable in Node) and use that if available.

By default this example will not authenticate with ngrok and is therefore subject to certain restrictions. To provide a secret token create a file called .env in the root directory of this repository and add the following line:

NGROK_TOKEN=MyVerySecretTokenFromNgrok

This example uses the dotenv Node package to load the variables declared in your .env file into the environment variables. As mentioned above, do not upload your secrets to GitHub.

To get a token you should sign up for an ngrok account. Once you have an account, go get your authtoken.