NodeSchool Assistant

Organizing a NodeSchool requires a lot of logistics; from finding dates, venue and food to updating the website to reflect the upcoming event.

The goal of this assistant is to help you automate the tedious work of creating the event and updating the NodeSchool website just by asking you some questions. Easy, right? Let's go to the details.

Installation

npm install -g nodeschool-assistant mustache stylus

Setup (Convention Over Configuration)

To make our lives easy, NodeSchool Assistant follows the Convention-over-Configuration approach. So, it does the following assumptions:

1. You have a .env file in your project where the configuration is stored (check the Environment Variables section for more details about the values required).
2. Your NodeSchool website is hosted on Github (using Github Pages).
3. The folder used as output for your HTML files is docs.
4. You use mustache and stylus to generate your website (this will be eventually more flexible).
5. The docs-src folder contains the sources for your website. There, you must have:

• data.json file: stores the data for your website (if it doesn't exist, it will be created after generating an event).
• images folder: holds your images (e.g. the social image generated by the assistant and any other image used by your website).
• styles folder: holds your Stylus files (.styl).
• templates folder: stores all the templates to generate your website. In there, you must have:
  • event-description.mustache: The template to create the event description (used in Meetup.com, for example).
  • index.mustache: The template to generate your website's index.html.
  • mentor-registration-issue.mustache: The template to create the Github ticket used for mentor registration.
  • social.mustache: The template to generate the HTML that will render your social image.

Environment Variables

These are the values required in the .env file inside the directory where your website lives:

• CHAPTER_NAME: The default name of your chapter (e.g. "NodeSchool Seattle")
• GITHUB_ORG: The github organization of your NodeSchool chapter (usually "nodeschool")
• GITHUB_REPO: The github repo where you host the website for your chapter (e.g. "seattle")
• GITHUB_API_TOKEN: Your personal github API token
• GITHUB_API_USER: Your github username
• MEETUP_API_KEY: Your Meetup.com API key
• MEETUP_URLNAME: The URL Name of your group on Meetup.com (e.g. "Meetup-API-Testing")
• MEETUP_GROUP_ID: The group ID of your group on Meetup.com (e.g. 1556336)
• BING_MAPS_API_KEY: Your Bing Maps API key (to geolocate the venue during event creation)
• GITHUB_REMOTE: (optional) The remote where you want to push when publishing (default: origin)
• GITHUB_BRANCH: (optional) The branch you want to push when publishing (default: master)
• SOCIAL_IMAGE_WIDTH: (optional) The desired width for your social image (default: 1200)
• SOCIAL_IMAGE_HEIGHT: (optional) The desired height for your social image (default: 630)

Usage

You can use the NodeSchool Assistant via the nsa command.

Create event

nsa create-event --provider=meetup

The NodeSchool Assistant will ask you a series of questions regarding the new event (name, location, etc), update the data.json, regenerate the website and publish the new version pushing the changes to your Github repo. You can use the flags --no-publish and --no-build to avoid publishing or updating the website (although it's not recommended).

Build website

nsa build-website

Useful if you manually edit the sources of your website and want to regenerate the HTML and the social image. Use it in conjunction with publish-website to upload a new version of the website to Github.

Publish webste

nsa publish-website

In case you manually edit your HTML or built a new version (with build-website) and want to publish the changes.

TO-DO

If you want to contribute, here are a couple of things you might want to look at:

• Put venue address in the github ticket and remove link to meetup.com event
• Upload featured image to Meetup.com event
• Fix lat,lng (location) when creating on Meetup.com
• Improve data.json (add all the answers to the questions and create the file if it doesn't exist)
• Add support for multiple event providers (for example, Eventbrite)
• Add unit tests
• Add input validations and default values
• Improve config (only store base path and let each module handle the specifics)
• Add flexible pipeline to generate website (like allowing custom commands) instead of hardcoding mustache and stylus. Maybe implementing something like a "recipe" or a list of bash commands that will be executed and must be defined somewhere in the source directory or just running something like npm run build