A web front-end for your DXspider node.

WebDX provides a standalone, drop-in web front-end for the popular DXspider cluster software.

WebDX allows anonymous users to receive a live, real-time feed of DX spots in any modern browser without needing specialized client software.

Installation

This is only one way of getting WebDX up and running; there are many possible variations!

This approach involves installing node.js, npm and WebDX into their own tree under /opt/webdx rather than installing node.js and npm globally.

1. Install system-level dependencies.

    aptitude install git python build-essential libssl-dev
   

2. Make a directory to contain everything we'll need to run WebDX:

    sudo mkdir -p /opt/webdx
    sudo chown $USER /opt/webdx
   

3. Temporarily add the directory that we're going to install the node.js binary into to our PATH. We'll need this to be able to install and run npm later on, but won't need it to run WebDX once the installation is complete.

    export PATH=$PATH:/opt/webdx/bin
   

4. WebDX depends on node.js and its package manager (npm). Start by downloading and installing node.js.

    mkdir ~/git
    cd ~/git
    git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/joyent/node.git
    cd node
    git checkout origin/v0.4
    ./configure --prefix=/opt/webdx
    make
    make install
   

5. Now we have node.js installed, we can turn our attention to npm.

   cd ~/git
   git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/isaacs/npm.git
   cd npm
   PREFIX=/opt/webdx make install
   

6. With node.js and npm installed, get a copy of the WebDX source, and use npm to install the node.js modules we depend on.

   cd /opt/webdx
   git clone git://github.com/clarkema/webdx.git
   npm install socket.io
   

Configuration

At this point everything is in place. Edit /opt/webdx/webdx/webdx.js and /opt/webdx/webdx/web/index.html; follow the comments in the files.

You also need to contrive some way to have your webserver make /opt/webdx/webdx/web available; generally this is done via an alias directive.

On lighttpd:

alias.url = ( "/webdx" => "/opt/webdx/webdx/web" )

On Apache:

Alias /webdx /opt/webdx/webdx/web

You should now be able to run WebDX:

/opt/webdx/bin/node /opt/webdx/webdx/webdx.js

TODO

Add daemon and init.d support.