Venture
An application built for hosting interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style presentations, originally built for the sole purpose of running a single conference talk at Keep Ruby Weird 2015.
It's built with Elixir, Phoenix, and React with ES6+ (thanks, Babel!).
If you'd like to learn more about how to create presentations with Venture, then follow the steps in the next section, and view the default presentation, which explains and demonstrates available features.
Building/Running Locally
The app consists of two components when running locally: the Phoenix application serving the slides and handling user interactions, and a webpack-dev-server hosting the frontend. You'll need a recent version of Elixir (developed/tested on 1.2.0) and node.js (5.4.0 is what I'm currently using) to get going.
Backend: /
$ mix deps.get
$ mix deps.compile
$ mix phoenix.server
Frontend: /client
You may want to check out a few configurable items in webpack/appconfig.js.
Then:
$ npm start
You can then connect to your frontend app at http://localhost:8000. In dev
mode, the presenter token is abc123 by default. You can change this in
config/config.exs, if you'd like. If you plan to host your presentation from
your laptop running in dev mode, you most certainly should change it.
Running Tests
Backend: /
$ mix test
Frontend: /client
$ npm test
Deploying
There's a very good chance, given the typical reliability of conference wifi, that you'll want to host your presentation on a server accessible via mobile phones and tethered devices.
If you have a VPS (or, I suppose, a non-virtual server -- some folks still have
those, right?) you can take a look at the files in support for a post-receive
hook and a simple start/restart script for a git-based deploy setup. Tweak as
necessary.
You'll need Elixir and node.js on the server, just as you did locally.