Node.js Integration for Drupal Modified for Typescript

Server app for the Node.js Integration Drupal module. https://www.drupal.org/project/nodejs

Prerequisites

• Node.js version 8+
• pm2 (optional)

Installation

Use the following method to download the app:

• Git clone this repository. Go to the root directory of the repo and run npm install followed by npm run build (without the example extension) or npm run build_all (with the example extension). The dist folder will contain the production ready files. Copy the contents of the dist folder to your server and then run npm install inside that directory.

In both cases, be sure the install the app outside of Drupal's root directory structure. No files in the running node server need to be served to the client via Drupal, the node server will handle serving socket.io. You may need to modify your .htaccess (or equivalent configuration) file to proxy traffic to your node server. I personally run the node server on a completely separate machine from the Drupal site. You can see this DigitalOcean documentation for a general idea of how to do this.

Configuration

Copy the example configuration file (nodejs.config.js.example) to nodejs.config.js. Edit that file and make any necessary configuration changes. See nodejs.config.js.example for details on the configuration values. As a minimum, you will need to set the serviceKey, and specify the location of your Drupal site in the backend property. The service key can be any arbitrary string, but be sure to enter the same service key in Drupal.

Running the server app

Start the app using the npm start.

npm start

This will run the app in the foreground. For production use, it is more practical to run the app in the background. One way to achieve this is starting the app with pm2.

pm2 start app.bundle.js

Not only will pm2 start the app in the background, but it will monitor it and automatically restart it if the app quits. See the pm2 documentation for more information.

Visit the status report on your Drupal site to verify if Drupal is able to communicate with the server app.

Building extensions

It's easiest to build extensions with the server in the same way that the example_extension is built. However, you can copy these files into a separate project and build it separately:

./src/extensions/example_extension.ts
./example_extension.webpack.config.js
./tsconfig.json

You can optionally copy the various configuration files as well or make your own:

./.eslintrc.json
./tslint.json

Once you have an extension built, you can install it by copying it to the root directory of the server in the extensions folder. You probably will want to have a package.json file similar to the server's server.package.json that you keep in your extension's install folder to install dependencies.

If you plan to use typescript to build extensions, you will want to have a drupal-nodejs-typescript.d.ts type definition for the server types as well. There isn't currently one that can be copied over. A simple stand-in one can be created by assigning the any type to all of the types you need to use.