mpbrucker/beary-good-trivia

Bear Trivia for the Olin Library

Bear Trivia

Created by Isa Blancett and Matt Brucker

Bear Trivia is a revolutionary new way to play trivia! Start a game of trivia with the bear, and he will ask you questions - send your answers via text, and earn points! Bear Trivia™ - it's fast, it's fun, and it's free.

Getting Set Up (client only)

This requires a running Bear server, and a Twilio ⟶ MQTT Gateway.

You should also have a Twilio phone number, and the credentials for The Bear server and Twilio gateway.

Local Install

Make sure you're running Python 3.6.

Postgres Setup

Running Bear Trivia requires a running PostgreSQL server. Bear Trivia is designed to work with PostgreSQL 9.6, but earlier versions may work as well. Follow the instructions here to install PostgreSQL. Next, create the database:

createdb trivia

Now, create a user and grant privileges on the database:

$ sudo -u postgres psql
CREATE USER bearclient WITH PASSWORD 'my_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE "trivia" to my_username;

Choose a password for my_password, and copy that value as POSTGRES_KEY in envrc.template.

Environment Setup

Copy envrc.template to .envrc. On Linux/macOS: cp envrc.template .envrc.

Replace the strings in .envrc by your Twilio and MQTT credentials and phone number.

Execute: source .envrc

Running the App

To install dependencies, run:

pip3 install -r requirements.text

Or, if you're using pipenv:

pipenv install

Start the Bear Trivia controller.

python bear_controller.py

Or, if you're using pipenv:

pipenv run python bear_controller.py

Remote (Heroku) Install

To deploy this app remotely, you'll need a Heroku account; get one here. Next, install the Heroku CLI (Linux only). Run heroku login with the credentials you created, and run heroku apps:create app-name, where app-name is a unique name for your app.

Remote Setup

In your app directory, run the following:

$ heroku git:remote -a app-name
$ git push heroku master

Environment Variable Setup

In order to run the app remotely, you need to setup the environment variables in Heroku. You can do this by running heroku config:set VAR_NAME=value for every environment variable in envrc.template, except DB_PASSWORD (we will get a different database password once we set that up). Alternatively, you can input them in your app's Settings tab on the Heroku Dashboard.

Heroku PosgreSQL Setup

To setup a basic PostgreSQL database in Heroku, run heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev. That's all you need to do for setup: Heroku automatically creates a new environment variable DATABASE_URL when you create the PostgreSQL database, which contains the server, port, username, and password.

Deployment

Once everything has been set up, run git push heroku master to push the app to Heroku.

Bear Speech Setup

In order to run the bear speech server, you need to have espeak (Linux only, on macOS it uses the builtin speech functionality):

sudo apt-get install espeak

Run the steps for "Environment Setup" above. Then, to run the bear speech client, run pipenv run python tts_worker.py. Now, the bear client will listen for messages from the trivia game, whether it's running locally or deployed to Heroku.

Acknowledgements

Based on Oliver Steele's bear-as-a-service project. All MQTT gateway and Twilio command code is based on the original bear-as-a-service project. Local install instructions, architecture diagram, and tests were also adapted from the original project's install instructions. The Heroku deployment instructions are also adapted from the Olin Web Deployment Toolbox.

LICENSE

MIT