About

Create location-specific notepads that are implicitly shared with people nearby. Pads have a radius and optionally an expiry time. The only catch is you have to have been there, to gain access to a pad. Easily share pictures, notes or links with people at a concert, conference or coffee shop; leave notes for your friends ("Python meetup - we're in the back!"), or create lists you can easily find in the right location ("Need Sriracha."). Once you gain access to a pad, you have the option to save it and access it later.

Geopad is a Node.js app built with Express and PostGIS on the backend. Jade is used for templating and socket.io for real time messaging.

Setup

• Modern versions of OS X come with an older version of postgresql pre-installed. You should remove the system postgres and then install a newer version.
• once you've cleared the old version (different versions don't coexist well together), install the via brew: brew install postgresql
• follow the brew instructions to create the first database with initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
• if the above command fails, probably need to increase shared memory:
  • sudo sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=65536
  • sudo sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=16777216
  • then rerun initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
• brew install postgis

On linux, install postgresql and postgis if not already present. As of July 2013 on Ubuntu 12.04, installation using the default apt-get packages postgresql and postgis did NOT work for me. Try using the new UbunutGIS PPA from the postgis folks, as follows:

• sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
• sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ppa
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1-postgis

modify the file sudo vi /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf. Change the line for unix domain sockets to authentication type md5:

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all     all                         md5

Set up the geopad database. cd into the top level repository directory. Execute the following commands from the shell (note you may need to become the postgres user before doing this):

• sudo su postgres (if appropriate. sometimes this user is also called psql. check /etc/passwd file to see a list of system users if not sure).
• createdb geopad
• psql -d geopad -c "CREATE EXTENSION postgis;"

now still as the postgres user, log into the postgres command line (psql) and create a user with appropriate permissions:

• CREATE USER geopad WITH PASSWORD 'somepassword';
• GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE geopad to geopad;
• ALTER USER geopad WITH login; (not sure if this is necessary?)

then log out of the psql shell and out of the postgres account. now as the geopad user create the dataabse tables as follows. creating the tables as the geopad user gives that user the permissions to query and modify those tables.

• psql -U geopad -d geopad -f dbinit.sql

There's a couple extra packages needed for the node-postgres module to work:

• sudo apt-get install postgresql-server-dev-9.1 libpq-dev

You need to have node.js and npm installed. Make sure you have the most current version of npm and node installed!

Install dependencies

• from the top level repo directory run npm install to install all the node dependencies listen in package.json

To Run

Start the server

• run node app.js to start the server
• optionally you can install nodemon, which automatically restarts node for you when any files change (useful for development). with nodemon run the app with nodemon app.js instead.

visit localhost:3000 in your browser