Creative Coding Ecologies

The Creative Coding Ecologies project contains the following moving parts:

• /backend Node.js back-end with API endpoints for retrieving responses to the Creative Coding Survey by Creative Coding Urecht (CCU).
• /website Static HTML/CSS front-end application. This web application shows an interacive Creative Coding Ecologies mapping. See creativecoding.community for the production environment of this website.

The codebase for the Creative Coding Survey (developed with Elm) can be found here.

Prerequisites

• Node.js, up to version 20 (LTS) is supported.
• MySQL server, for the database used by the back-end.

The back-end / API

All sources and dependencies for the front-end are located in the directory backend.

Development

Set the following environment variables:

• CREATIVE_CODING_API_PORT - the HTTP port number (e.g. export CREATIVE_CODING_API_PORT=8081)
• MAPPING_DB_PASSWORD - the password for accessing the mappping database on the local machine (e.g. export MAPPING_DB_PASSWORD="password")

Running

During development, you can start the front-end with:

export CREATIVE_CODING_API_PORT=8081
export MAPPING_DB_PASSWORD="password"

node backend/app.js

Deployment

The server process will typically be managed by pm2. The project contains an ecosystem file for this.

Please note, through GitHub Actions the deployment is being updated after each push to the main branch!

Front-end

All sources and dependencies for the front-end are located in the directory website.

Development

During development, you can start the front-end with:

npm run start

When running the project, Node.js might complain about OpenSSL providers. In that case, you can provide the following option when starting Node:

NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider npm run start

The front-end assumes the back-end to be hosted at mapping-api.creativecodingutrecht.nl. If retrieving data from the back-end fails, the application will revert back to using mock data in src/data/surveyData.js.

Building

The front-end can be built for production with:

npm run build