Nodekick

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Nodekick is a realtime, multiplayer fighting game built using NodeJS, socket.io, and pixi.js.

This codebase is a cleaned up version of what our team built for Node Knockout 2013. Out of 385 teams, we placed 15th overall and 6th in the "fun/utility" category.

Screenshots and Instruction to deploy your own Nodekick.

Run Locally

Due to the use of websockets (and time sensitive game events over those sockets), this game server will not perform well on a Windows machine (tested on Windows 7).

Install node:

brew install node
brew upgrade node

Clone the repo:

git clone REPO_URL
cd REPO_DIRECTORY

Install all the dependencies:

npm install

Run the app:

npm start

Then navigate to http://localhost:3000 (use chrome or firefox).

Signing up, and deploying to Heroku

Documentation

From heroku.com, click Documentation, then click the Getting Started button, then click Node.js from the list of options on the left...which will take you here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/nodejs

Install Heroku toolbelt from here: https://toolbelt.heroku.com/

Sign up via the website (no credit card required).

Login using the command line tool:

heroku login

Create your heroku app:

heroku create

Git deploy your app:

git push heroku master

Open the app (same as opening it in the browser):

heroku open

And your app should be up on Heroku.

Deploy to Infrastructure as a Service

The deployment instructions thus far have been about deploying to PaaS. You can spin up your own linux box and deploy Nodekick (or any other NodeJS app for that matter). This is of course a bit harder, but you'll have fine grained control over your box as opposed to being constrained to what PaaS provides.

Signing up and deploying to Amazon EC2

Sign up for Amazon AWS at http://aws.amazon.com/

Take note of any Access and Secret Keys provided during the sign up process, you won't get another chance to look at these.

AWS CLI Installation

Automatic

After this, you'll want to install the Amazon CLI, instructions located here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-set-up.html

Clutch

I found that AWS CLI is open source. So I decided to build it from its source as opposed to installing it.

First I cloned the repo

git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-cli

The source is written in Python. So you'll have to install that based on whatever OS you are running. Brew, apt-get flavors, and chocolatey all have a means to install Python.

After cloning the repo, I checked out the latest tag (at this point it was 1.11.35)

git checkout tags/1.11.35

I then built and installed.

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

There is a good chance (especially if you are developing on a Mac), that the above commands would have also moved the generated executable files to an appropriate location which is already referenced in your $PATH environment variable. Try running

aws help

If you get an error saying that the command was not found, then you would need to manually ensure that the generated files are referenced in $PATH.

Looking at the console output of the build, the files were copied to build/scripts-2.7 (this may be different for your OS). Navigating to this directory, I then ran

python aws

Which yielded results.

Now that we have a successful build, move the scripts to a location of your choosing and expose the directory to $PATH. I chose to put the scripts in /usr/local/aws-cli/bin

After moving the scripts over, I added the following line to my .bashrc. If you are on windows, you can place the directory in the C: drive and manipulate the path variable by right clicking My Computer, Properties, Advanced.

export PATH="/usr/local/aws-cli/bin:$PATH"

After you have updated your .bashrc or the Environment Variables (and have sourced the new file... or restarted your computer), you should be able to run the aws command from anywhere.

##Configuring AWS CLI

This section is based on the documentation located here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html

The simplest way to use a configuration file with the AWS CLI is to name it config and place it in a folder named .aws in your home directory. On Windows, that would look like C:\Users\USERNAME.aws\config. On Linux, OS X, or Unix, that is ~/.aws/config. The AWS CLI will automatically check this location for a configuration file.

Start by creating an empty configuration file.

mkdir ~/.aws
touch ~/.aws/config

You'll need to provide your Access Key, Secret Key, Region and Output Format. Here is a sample config file.

[default]
aws_access_key_id=REDACTED
aws_secret_access_key=REDACTED
region=us-east-1
output=json

A full region list can be found here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#ec2_region

You can go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#security_credential to see your security credentials, but the secret access key is only shown once. If you didn't write down your secret key, you can create a new one here.

Generating a Key Pair for SSH

You can log into boxes by using a key pair (as opposed to using a password). You have to associate your key pair when you create the instances. So we'll set up the key pair first. The following command creates a key pair and saves the return value to a file (the data that is returned is important, and must be saved on creation).

aws ec2 create-key-pair --key-name nodeboxes --query 'KeyMaterial' --output text > nodeboxes.pem

Creating a Security Group for you NodeJS Apps

We also want to create a security group for our NodeJS applications. This will also be associated with the instance we create.

aws ec2 create-security-group --group-name "nodeapps" --description "NodeJS Applications"

Which will return something like:

{
    "return": "true",
    "GroupId": "GROUPID"
}

After we have the security group created, we need to set up ssh and http ports.

aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-name nodeapps --protocol tcp --port 22 --cidr 0.0.0.0/0
aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-name nodeapps --protocol tcp --port 80 --cidr 0.0.0.0/0

Creating an EC2 Instance

You can run the aws ec2 describe-images command to see all images you have access to (it will take a while to return). I ended up going to the Create Instance page on the website to find the Ubuntu 13 micro instances I wanted to spin up. The rest of the instructions assume that you are using an Ubuntu 13 box.

Here is the command that returns the Ubuntu 14 box I ended up cloning:

aws ec2 describe-images help
aws ec2 describe-images --filters Name=image-id,Values=ami-ad184ac4
aws ec2 describe-images --filters Name=name,Values="*Ubuntu*"

To create an ec2 instance for this image (and associate it with the key pair and security group we just created). Run the following command:

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-60f37908 --count 1 --instance-type t1.micro --security-groups nodeapps --key-name nodeboxes

You can then run aws ec2 describe-instances | grep PublicDnsName to get the public dns.

With the dns information and the .pem file, you should be able to ssh into the box (git bash on Windows has an ssh client). Here is the command to log into the box. First we need to edit the permissions of the .pem file, then we should be able to log in.

chmod 600 ~/.aws/nodeboxes.pem
ssh-add ~/.aws/nodeboxes.pem
ssh ubuntu@PUBLICDNS

If you mess up the creation of your instance, you can delete it using the following command:

aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids INSTANCEID

You can then run aws ec2 describe-instances to get the instance id.

Setting up NodeJS on the EC2 Instance

Once you've ssh'ed into the box. We'll use apt-get to install the programs needed to retrieve, compile and run our app.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install g++
sudo apt-get install make
sudo apt-get install openssl
sudo apt-get install git

To install node and npm, we will use nvm, which is a nice tool to manage, and have different versions of node co-exist on the same machine. Use the install script for the latest version found here (you may choose to precede the command with sudo). Then, install the latest version of node and npm:

nvm install node

Now lets start and configure nginx (it will act as a reverse proxy and send all requests on port 80 to node).

sudo update-rc.d nginx on

then

sudo service nginx start

Now to configure nginx. You'll need to use a text editor to do this (I use VIM).

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Replace the contents of the file with the following:

upstream node {
    server 127.0.0.1:3000;
    keepalive 256; # not necessary
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost; # domain of my site
    access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error.log;

    large_client_header_buffers 8 32k;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;

        proxy_buffers 8 32k;
        proxy_buffer_size 64k;

        proxy_pass http://node;
        proxy_redirect off;

        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

        tcp_nodelay on; # not necessary
    }
 }

Save the file, then restart nginx

sudo service nginx restart

Now that we have nginx configured, we can clone the Nodekick repo.

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/amirrajan/nodekick.git
cd nodekick
npm install

And start up the app using forever (this will keep the app running even if we log off).

npm install forever -g

Run the app

forever start --spinSleepTime 10000 start.js

That's it! You should now be able to hit the public IP for your box and should be able to play Nodekick!