Urban CO2

About

This is an interactive web app to communicate the importance of cities as sources of CO2 emissions. In this web experience, we explain what we can do to monitor and reduce the impact of our carbon footprint. The project will highlight the potential and innovative use of mobile CO2 sensors to monitor CO2 in the city and also allow people to access the data that describes the CO2 emissions for the city of Vancouver, BC.

As part of a Mozilla Science Fellowship Sprint, we are working to help communicate scientific research and to show the process of creating such visualizations.

Setup

This page is built on Node.js and a handful of other handy technologies. Please follow the following steps to get setup.

I took the setup documentation from:

• Setup nodejs with homebrew on osx
• setup mongodb with homebrew on osx

On OSX:

(IF YOU ALREADY HAVE NODE JS AND MONGODB INSTALLED SKIP TO THE DEPENDENCIES SECTION)

Homebrew

Fire up your terminal:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Make sure your system is up to date by running:

brew update

As a safe measure, run brew doctor to make sure your system is ready to brew. Follow any recommendations from brew doctor.

brew doctor

you will have to then add homebrew to your computer's system path by pasting this into your terminal:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

Install Node

You can now install node:

brew install node

Technically now you're ready to build the project, however, let's install a handy Node module that allows us to automagically update our server each time we save our server.js file. This module is called nodemon and we can install it like so:

npm install -g nodemon

If you're new to node the -g flag allows you to access that package globally in the terminal. You'll see how this works when we run our server.

Install Mongodb

We will use mongodb as our project database. You can install it using homebrew as well. Again, in your terminal run:

brew update
brew install mongodb

Now you will have a mongodb database setup on your computer.

Dependencies

Install project dependencies

Install the dependencies listed in the package.json. You will use the npm install command in your terminal in the project directory.

Fire up your terminal and:

cd urbanco2
npm install

Run

We will have to do 3 things:

1. Start our mongodb
2. Run our node server.

In the terminal. Run:

mkdip -p /data/db # creates the mongodb data directory if it doesn't already exist
mongod

This will start our mongodb database running on our computer. We can then access the running mongodb database we create for the project from our node.js server.

Next in another terminal window, cd urbanco2 and run:

nodemon server.js

more soon!