nombox-server

Bridges functionality of web resources and nombox clients using redis pub/sub.

Well, that doesn't tell you much...what we're really talking about here is taking a variety of resources like Twitch chat messages, Streamlabs donations, or even sensor readings off a Raspberry Pi, and combining them into a common stream of data that is more easily accessible than writing your own web-socket code or chat bots. All of the heavy lifting (connection management, authorization, etc) is done with nombox-server plugins, and as the user, you simply have to connect to a Redis server and subscribe to the messages that you're interested in.

See It In Action

This whole thing was conceived as the backend for a system that would allow me to transparently overlay an instance of Unity on top of my stream and have it react to interesting events. In this example, the people in my chat are using keywords to activate objects in the scene (fire missiles, run a ban-animation, and trigger "toasty" popups).

Installation and Setup

git clone https://github.com/laddspencer/nombox-server.git
cd nombox-server
npm install

modules.json

A sample config file modules_example.json is include in the source tree; use this as the basis for your own by copying or renaming it to modules.json.

[
  {
    "name": "twitch-redis-bridge",
    "enabled": true,
    "args": ["-F", "/path/to/trb_config.json"],
    "options": {}
  },
  {
    "name": "streamlabs-redis-bridge",
    "enabled": true,
    "args": ["-F", "/path/to/srb_config.json"],
    "options": {}
  }
]

• name: the script or package name. When adding your own modules, this does not have to refer to a package in node_modules; it can be a path to any Node.js file or package directory (e.g. ./foo/my_script.js).
• enabled: true or false, enables or disables loading of the module when nombox-server is started.
• args: command-line arguments passed to the module script.
• options: this is the options parameter passed to fork().

Edit the new file to configure plugin modules or add your own. Two modules, twitch-redis-bridge and streamlabs-redis-bridge, are included by default. Their packages are downloaded during the npm install step and can be found under node_modules. If these are to be employed, the path to their config files (the args element after -F) must be set. Absolute paths work best, but relative paths will work if you're careful about which directory you're running nombox-server from.

Configuration Files

Each config file pointed to by modules.json should be updated to specify the path to the module's respective credentials file. There are example configuration and credential files in the config directory. See twitch-redis-bridge and streamlabs-redis-bridge for more details on how to get those modules working.

Windows 10 Linux Subsystem

This was built and tested on a Linux server, but it can be run on Windows 10 using the new Linux Subsystem. If this is the route you choose, there are some things to be aware of.

Node.js

The version of Node.js available through apt-get on Win10 (Linux Subsystem) is too old, so we build ourselves a copy of the latest LTS release. From a Linux shell:

sudo apt-get install python gcc make g++
curl -O https://nodejs.org/dist/v10.15.3/node-v10.15.3.tar.gz
tar xzvf node-v10.15.3.tar.gz
cd node-v10.15.3/
./configure
make
sudo make install

This will install Node.js under /usr/local/bin/node. I like to add a symlink under /usr/bin so all of my scripts can be run without modification. At some point the executable came to be called node instead of nodejs; I like to make the symlink use the old name anyway.

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node nodejs

Redis

The Redis server does not run by default on Windows. In my experience, I have to start it manually every time I want to run nombox-server on my Windows machine.

Windows firewall is likely blocking access to the default redis port (6379). If that is the case, you will have to add a rule to allow access to this port.