REST API

Installing & Configuring Node (on Raspbian)

I used a guide @ rueedlinger.ch for installing an up-to-date Node.js, as the one from apt-get was quite out of date. Also, I didn't have luck with Node 10.5, so I went with Node 10.2.

You download binaries, so it's very straight forward.

sudo mkdir /opt/node
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.2/node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
tar xvzf node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
sudo cp -r node-v0.10.2-linux-arm-pi/* /opt/node

Change the default profile with

sudo nano /etc/profile

And add these lines before "export PATH"

NODE_JS_HOME="/opt/node"
NODE_PATH="/opt/node"
PATH="$NODE_JS_HOME/bin/:$PATH"

And then log out and back in.

Installing NPM Modules

Install "forever" as a global npm module. To do this you might have to set the proper path as root. "sudo su" is used here as a stop gap / work-around, I don't recommend it as a habit. If I could've done it a different way here, I would've. However, this worked so it's worth the two lines as su.

sudo su
PATH=/opt/node/bin/:$PATH
npm install forever -g
exit

(If you install it local first, before that, you might have to uninstall both, and then install globally)

Per node-i2c module readme on Raspbian

After installing i2c, you'll need to configure that the modules are available.

sudo vi /etc/modules

And add

i2c-bcm2708
i2c-dev

Then edit

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf

And comment out the i2c module so it looks like:

# blacklist i2c-bcm2708

Load the kernel module

sudo modprobe i2c-bcm2708

...You may need to reboot at this point.

Check that it's there

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo ls /dev/i2c-* -l
crw------- 1 root root 89, 0 Oct 23 20:03 /dev/i2c-0
crw------- 1 root root 89, 1 Oct 23 20:03 /dev/i2c-1

Giving proper permissions to the i2c devices

Here we modify our udev rules in order to modify the i2c device to be owned by root. In the usermod command replace "pi" with the username of your choice, if you so wish.

sudo groupadd i2c
sudo usermod -aG i2c pi 
sudo echo 'KERNEL=="i2c-[0-9]*", GROUP="i2c"' >> /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local_i2c_group.rules

Setting up syslog

The server process uses node-syslog to get the logging done, which in turn requires some setup on the syslogd on your system. Again note, if you're using a pre-configured distro, this will already be setup for you.

In my example configuration in Pidora, we'll edit our syslog.conf

nano /etc/rsyslog.conf

And we'll add these two lines:

# Save veeOP daemon messages to	veeop.log
local5.*                                                /var/log/veeop.conf

Then restart the daemon with

sudo service syslog restart

You'll probably also want to rotate this log, go and edit instructions for syslog

nano /etc/logrotate.d/veeop

And fill it with:

/var/log/veeop.log {
    missingok
    notifempty
    size 5M
    yearly
    create 0600 root root
}