Covey.Town provides a virtual meeting space where different groups of people can have simultaneous video calls, allowing participants to drift between different conversations, just like in real life. Our application extends the Covey.Town application created by Jonathan Bell for Northeastern's Spring 2021 software engineering course. The github repo for the original application can be found here.
This addition to the Covey.Town Codebase allows users to interact with a two new features "Placeables" and "player Permissions"
Repository
Front-end deployment on Netlify
Back-end deployment on Heroku
Running the application locally entails running both the backend service and a frontend.
To run the backend, you will need a Twilio account. Twilio provides new accounts with $15 of credit, which is more than enough to get started. To create an account and configure your local environment:
- Go to Twilio and create an account. You do not need to provide a credit card to create a trial account.
- Create an API key and secret (select "API Keys" on the left under "Settings")
- Create a
.envfile in theservices/roomServicedirectory, setting the values as follows:
| Config Value | Description |
|---|---|
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID |
Visible on your twilio account dashboard. |
TWILIO_API_KEY_SID |
The SID of the new API key you created. |
TWILIO_API_KEY_SECRET |
The secret for the API key you created. |
TWILIO_API_AUTH_TOKEN |
Visible on your twilio account dashboard. |
Once your backend is configured, you can start it by running npm start in the services/roomService directory (the first time you run it, you will also need to run npm install).
The backend will automatically restart if you change any of the files in the services/roomService/src directory.
Create a .env file in the frontend directory, with the line: REACT_APP_TOWNS_SERVICE_URL=http://localhost:8081 (if you deploy the rooms/towns service to another location, put that location here instead)
In the frontend directory, run npm start (again, you'll need to run npm install the very first time). After several moments (or minutes, depending on the speed of your machine), a browser will open with the frontend running locally.
The frontend will automatically re-compile and reload in your browser if you change any files in the frontend/src directory.
This new upgraded version of Covey.Town doesn't have any extra installation features that you need to worry about. Just make sure to do an npm install in both the front-end and back-end, follow the above steps for running locally and you should be all set.
You can clone our repository by entering:
$ git clone https://github.com/rahulguin/CoveyTown.git
This version of Covey.Town is built on top of the original repo. Hence, you would simply need to merge this repo with the original repo using the steps provided in Activity 10.1.