willberriss/gameon-room-nodejs

Walkthrough for creating a room in JavaScript for Game On!

Microservices with a Game On! Room

Game On! is both a sample microservices application, and a throwback text adventure brought to you by the wasdev team at IBM. This application demonstrates how microservice architectures work from two points of view:

1. As a Player: navigate through a network/maze of rooms, where each room is a unique implementation of a common API. Each room supports chat, and interaction with items (some of which may be in the room, some of which might be separately defined services as well).
2. As a Developer: learn about microservice architectures and their supporting infrastructure by extending the game with your own services. Write additional rooms or items and see how they interact with the rest of the system.

You can learn more about Game On! at http://game-on.org/.

##Introduction

This walkthrough will guide you through adding a room to a running Game On! microservices application. You will be shown how to setup a Node.js room that is deployed as a Cloud Foundry application in Bluemix.

Installation prerequisites

When deployed using an instant runtime, Gameon-room-nodejs requires:

• Bluemix account
• IBM DevOps Services Account
• GitHub account

Create Bluemix accounts and log in

To build a Game On! room in Bluemix, you will first need a Bluemix account.

Sign up and log in to Bluemix and DevOps

Sign up for Bluemix at https://console.ng.bluemix.net and DevOps Services at https://hub.jazz.net. When you sign up, you'll create an IBM ID, create an alias, and register with Bluemix.

Get Game On! ID and Shared Secret

For a new room to register with the Game On! application, you must first log into game-on.org and sign in using one of several methods to get your Game On! ID and Shared Secret.

1. Go to https://game-on.org/ and click Enter.
2. Select an authentication method and log in with your user name and password for that type.
3. View your user profile using the link in the top right. It is either your username or a person icon.
4. You should now see your Game On! ID and Shared Secret near the bottom of the page.

Registering your room

In production its likely that multiple instances of your service will exist. As a result of this, by default the sample rooms do not register themselves (you need to provide the GAMEON_ID and GAMEON_SECRET to do this). The preferred way to register a room is either via the command line regutil tool or via the interactive map. Below are the instructions for using the interactive map to register a new room in GameOn!.

1. Go to the interactive map service
2. Under Tools, select Room Developer.
3. Set your Game On! id and Shared Secret fields that you obtained in the steps above, and then close the window.
4. From the Tools menu again, select Create new room.
5. Under the Room tab set the Name, Full Name and Description.
6. Under Connection, set the web socket url that your room will be avilable on. If you don't yet know this you can leave this blank and update it later.

Deploying as a Cloud Foundry app

Getting the source code

Our source code is stored on GitHub.

1. Go to the project's GitHub repository and fork it to your own GitHub repository.
2. Navigate to IBM DevOps.
3. Click CREATE PROJECT.
4. Enter a name for your Project.
5. Select Link to an existing GitHub repository.
6. Select Link to a Git Repo on GitHub.
7. Choose your newly forked project from the dropdown menu that appears.
8. Choose your Region, Organization, and Space. Generally the defaults will be sufficient.
9. Click CREATE. This will fork your GitHub project into IBM DevOps services, and redirect you to your new project.

Setup environment variables

Once you have created your new project, you will be able to configure the room to your liking.

1. From your IBM DevOps project, click EDIT CODE at the upper right corner of your project's overview page.
2. Click on the Play button found above the README, this will deploy your app to Bluemix.
3. Click on DASHBOARD at the top right of the page to navigate to your Bluemix dashboard.
4. Select the newly deployed application which will be named after your project.
5. Click Environment Variables on the left side of your application's Overview page.
6. Click on USER-DEFINED and then enter each of the following variables:

• Click ADD, for Name enter ROOM_NAME, for Value enter what you'd like your room to be named.
• Click ADD, for Name enter FULL_NAME, for Value enter what you'd like your room's full name to be.
• Click ADD, for Name enter DESCRIPTION, for Value enter what you'd like your room's description to be. Please Note: If you want to register your room directly from here you can do this by setting the following additional environment variables:
• Click ADD, for Name enter GAMEON_ID, and use the Game On! ID you got earlier for Value.
• Click ADD, for Name enter GAMEON_SECRET, and use the Shared Secret you got earlier for Value.

7. Click SAVE.

Deploy to IBM Container service

Installation prerequisites

1. Cloud foundry API
2. Install the IBM Containers plugin

Deploying as a single container

1. Log in to the IBM container service. This needs to be done in two stages:
2. Log into the Cloud Foundry CLI using cf login. Ypu will need to specify the API endpoint as api.ng.bluemix.net for the US South server, or api.eu-gb.bluemix.net for the UK server.
3. After this run the command cf ic login. This will perform the authentication to the IBM Container Service.
4. Build the container in the Bluemix registry by running the command cf ic build -t gonode . from the root of the project.
5. Run cf ic images and check your image is available.
6. Start the container by running the command cf ic run -p 3000 --name gonode <registry>/<namespace>/gonode. You can find the full path from the output of cf ic images. An example would be:

cf ic run -p 3000 --name gonode registry.ng.bluemix.net/pavittr/gonode

5. While you are waiting for the container to start, request a public IP address using the command cf ic ip request. This will return you a public IP address you can bind to your container.
6. With the returned IP address, bind it using the command cf ic ip bind <ip address> gonode.
7. Issue cf ic ps, and wait for your container to go from "Networking" to "Running".
8. You should now be able to access your room from GameOn!

Deploy as a container group

Instead of deploying a container as a single instance, you can instead deploy a container group. A container group can be used to deploy multiple instances of the same container and load balance between them.

1. Log in to the IBM container service. This needs to be done in two stages:
2. Log into the Cloud Foundry CLI using cf login. Ypu will need to specify the API endpoint as api.ng.bluemix.net for the US South server, or api.eu-gb.bluemix.net for the UK server.
3. After this run the command cf ic login. This will perform the authentication to the IBM Container Service.
4. Run cf ic images and check the gonode image is available. If not, run the command cf ic build -t gonode . from the root of the project to create it.
5. Create the container group by running cf ic group create -p 3000 -n <appName> --name gonodegroup <registry>/<namespace>/gonode. You can find the full path from the output of cf ic images. An example would be:

cf ic group create -p 3000 --name gonodegroup registry.ng.bluemix.net/pavittr/gonode

4. Run the command cf ic route map -n <appHost> -d mybluemix.net gonodegroup. This will make your containers available at .mybluemix.net.
5. Run the command cf ic group instances gonodegroup to check the status of your instances. Once they are in "Running" state your group is ready to use.
6. You will now be able to access the web socket of your room on http://<appName>.mybluemix.net

Access room on Game On!

Once the room is set up and it has registered with Game On!, it will be accessible on Game On!. It may take a moment for the room to appear.

1. Log in to Game On! using the authentication method you used to create your user ID and shared secret for the registered room.
2. Use the Game On! command /listmyrooms from The First Room, to see your list of rooms. Once your room is registered, it will appear in that list.
3. To get to your room, navigate through the network or go directly there by using the /teleport command from The First Room.
4. Look at the Bluemix log console to see "A new connection has been made to the room" command from The First Room.

List of host provided commands

The Game On! host provides a set a universal commands:

• /exits - List of all exits from the current room.
• /help - List all available commands for the current room.
• /sos - Go back to The First Room.

The First Room commands

The First Room is usually where new users will start in Game On!. From there, additional commands are available and maintained by Game On!. For the list of current commands use the /help command.