pjcdawkins / election_livestats

Election Livestats

Election Livestats is a module for Drupal 7 that extends the Election module to provide live statistics.

Note that all version numbers provided for dependencies or requirements reflect the development environment and can be substituted for other versions with compatible APIs.

Dependencies

• Election 7.x-1.0-beta25 (http://drupal.org/project/election) with patch 2387261.
• Libraries API 7.x-2.2 (http://drupal.org/project/libraries)

Software Requirements

• Node.js v0.10.33
• npm v1.4.28
• Redis v2.2.1
• [phpredis] v2.2.7 (https://github.com/phpredis/phpredis)
• Highcharts v4.1.1.

Installation

• Run npm install in node/ folder
• Set your configuration in node/config.json. You can do this by renaming or copying config.json.example.
• Install the Highcharts library. The Libraries module has a good FAQ on installing external libraries.

Configuration

This module requires metrics to be implemented via hook_election_livestats_metrics_alter. An example metric "Total votes" is included by way of example. Documentation on the structure of metric classes is to come.

There is also a "view election live statistics" permission that you will need to configure before the live statistics page is visible.

You may need to open port 3000 on your firewall (e.g. on Ubuntu, ufw allow 3000/tcp).

Running

• Start Redis server.
• Run node node/app.js.
  Note: If the certificates are in a read-protected directory, the app will need to be run in sudo.
• For every election for which you want to have live statistics, you will need go to election/%election_id/stats/actions and Cache eligibility and metadata.. Depending on your electorate size, this may take some time.
• Once this is complete, you should see a "Total votes" header at election/%election_id/stats/. This will indicate how many votes have been cast as voting continues.

Process Monitoring

Ideally the Node.js app should run as a service on the server, so start it as a daemon or service in the way you prefer. I would recommend using PM2 to monitor the app, running pm2 startup to start it on boot.

Alternatively, the upstart script node/election_livestats_node.conf is included in this repository. To use it, change the directory in the script section to point to your election_livestats folder and then copy it to /etc/init/.

Security Considerations

Please note that currently there is no authentication on the websocket server. As a result, even if your election is only visible to certain users, anyone could connect to the websocket server and receive live statistics updates.