Objectlab Party Server : Installation

The 'party server' does just that: it serves the party, dude. Not the Party (in the Bolshevik sense), but the Par-tay.

Actually, it handles things like:

• User Registration
• Image Upload
• Beacon 'Claiming'
• Bar Score Updating

Version

1.0

Installation

The server has only been tested on *nix (specifically Ubuntu), but should work with any Python 2.6+ installation.

First you need to have Python installation.
Next big item, mysql.

Next, you need to set up Bottle.

http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/index.html

Some useful Bottle dependencies that we utilized:

 pip install mysql-python
 pip intall bottle-mysql
 pip install beaker
 pip install simplejson

Installing mysql:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client.

Once you have everything installed, it's a good idea to test your python-to-MySQL connection.. You can open a Python session and type the following:

import MySQLdb as mdb
con = mdb.connect(<your serverName>, <your db userName>, <your db password>, <your db database>)

If it doesn't throw an exception, you're good to go.

If you do get mysql errors connect errors, check your dynamic link path. Something like:

MYSQL=/usr/local/mysql/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$MYSQL
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mysql/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

###Creating the database:

Once you get mysql installed, you should create a new database (or you can just use the default. It won't matter because there is only one table.)

create database <insert db name here>;
use database <insert db name here>;

Now you can create the table schema:

CREATE TABLE USER (
  USER_ID int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  NAME varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  IMG_REF varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  BAR_SCORE int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_1 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_2 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_3 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_4 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_5 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_6 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_7 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  BEACON_8 int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  FOUND_EGGS int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  LAST_BAR_DETECTION timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  LAST_BEACON_CLAIM timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  DEVICE_ID varchar(255) DEFAULT '',
  UNIQUE KEY `USER_ID` (`USER_ID`)
);

###Deployment:

Bottle is a great little wsgi app server that ships with its own HTTP server. This is fine for testing, but I didn't think it would hold together with more than a few people using it. Both the iPhone app and the D3.js visualization make a lot of server requests so we needed a more scaleable container than the default server.

####UWSGI

UWSGI supports pre-forked, multi-threaded access to Python applications that conform to the WSGI standard. (more information here: http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

You can run the UWSGI container in a bunch of different ways, but we settled on the following for our deployment:

uwsgi --http :9080 --wsgi-file /home/cmollis/partyrockin/partyrockin.py --master --processes 20 --threads 4


//This command runs the bottle app on port 9080 with 20 pre-forked processes; 4 connection threads per process.

Now that we have a performant container for our application, we should put a performant web server in front of it.

####NGINX Finally, we installed NGINX on port 80 and locked down all of the other ports on the AWS instance. We wanted to use NGINX to reverse-proxy to the UWSGI instance, but also serve up any images and static files (like user images taken with their phones, and the D3.js visualization).

There is a lot of web collateral on how to set up NGINX as a reverse-proxy:

http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-set-up-nginx-as-a-reverse-proxy-for-apache2-on-ubuntu-12.04

Here is an excerpt from our server configuration:

server {
        #listen   80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
        #listen   [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6

        root /usr/share/nginx/www;
        index index.html index.htm;

        # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
        server_name localhost;

        location @proxy {

                proxy_pass http://localhost:9080;
                include /etc/nginx/proxy_params;
        }

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to index.html
                #try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
                # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location
                # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules

                try_files $uri @proxy;
        }

        location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|svg|ico|pdf|html|htm)$ {
       }

        location /doc/ {
                alias /usr/share/doc/;
                autoindex on;
                allow 127.0.0.1;
                deny all;
        }