This is an attempt to build a consolidated walkthrough for setting up a ubuntu 16.04 droplet and installing:

• speckleAdmin
• speckleServer
• speckleViewer

with a NGINX reverse proxy server, and synchronized URL's

The steps for this are taken from Digital Ocean tutorials and Speckle documents. I have modified them or outlined them to focus on running a server exclusively for Speckle. This is intended for myself and other novice developers/users.

While I have been using digitalocean for their costs and excellent noob friendly tutorials, these steps should work on any Virtual Privat Server (VPS)

Im using a Ubuntu 16.04.5 x64 1Gb 1vCPU 25 GB Standard Droplet

Set it up with SSH from PuttyGen and access it through Putty.

Set up a Speck super user with Admin privileges and get a ufw fire wall setup

• My Quick Summary
• Digital Ocean Initial Server Setup

Install and get running NGINX as a reverse proxy server, for three server blocks

• Digital Ocean Nginx Install
• Digital Ocean Nginx Server Blocks

not going to discuss here other than some basics:

• domain is an A record set to your IP address on port 80
• sub-domain can is a cname record set to @.

Set up SSL for encrypted connections, its free and its comforting to see the lock up in the corner. its also crazy easy to do: Digital Ocean Certbot Tutorial

ok, now on to the simplicity of getting the speckle suite running....

Getting the speckle server is straight forward but I still don't actually know where the other apps are supposed to be installed. Im sure its documented out there somewhere...

1. Install mongodb, redis servers and npm:

   $ sudo apt-get install mongodb redis npm
   

2. Clone SpeckleServer and run npm to install the needed nodejs packages:

   $ git clone https://github.com/speckleworks/SpeckleServer.git
   $ cd SpeckleServer
   $ npm install
   

3. Follow the instructions in .env-base file to configure your server.

4. Start mongo (create a folder somewhere to store the db):

   $ mongodb --dbpath /path/to/some/folder
   

5. Start redis in another terminal:

   $ redis-server
   

6. Check that both mongo and redis are running OK and that you can connect to them with these two clients:

   $ mongo
   $ redis-cli
   

7. Start Speckle in a third terminal:

   $ node server.js
   

# install dependencies
npm install

# serve with hot reload at localhost:8080
npm run dev

# build for production with minification
npm run build

It is worth noting that registered users have access to a speckle viewer from their user page... Having a personal Speckle Viewer hosted on a server may be of value for publicly accessible models?

# install dependencies
npm install

# serve with hot reload at localhost:8888 (8080 is taken by the local speckle server instance 💯)
npm run dev

# build for production with minification
npm run build

You will need to modify the ./dist/config.js file to fit your deployment details. It’s rather self-descriptive, it just exports a global object with info:

var SpkAppConfig = {
  serverUrl: 'http://localhost:8080',
  allowGuestAccess: true,
  logoUrl: 'https://company.png'
}

window.SpkAppConfig = SpkAppConfig

I'm an aspiring developer but this is really pointing to other peoples work. a big thanks goes to Dimitrie A. Stefanescu and the Speckle Project Contributors.

Also a thanks to digital ocean for providing excellent tutorials and documentation to help get novice backend developers familiar with the basics.