Continuing a previous post https://smathermather.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/a-public-sector-use-for-geojson-io/, I have been exploring the use of geojson.io for an easy to deploy way for folks to edit geojson.  For my purposes this led to a dive into node.

Getting node to run well on ubuntu is not as easy as:

sudo apt-get install node

Nope, tried that. Better to use/get a newer version of node. For this we turn to PPAs (Personal Package Archives).

Install Node:

sudo apt-get install g++ curl libssl-dev apache2-utils
sudo apt-get install git-core
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs

Now get our geojson.io:

git clone git://github.com/mapbox/geojson.io
cd geojson.io

Now we need to leverage nodes package management. geojson.io comes with a “shrinkwrap” file called package.json which tells the package manager the dependencies. thus the install command is simple:

sudo npm install 

Don’t use the -g flag above– the makefile expects relative paths for the dependencies.

Then we use make to minify the javascript, etc:

make 

and serve with ahem serve:

sudo npm install -g serve 

Now we can run a quick test of it served up using serve

sudo serve -p 80 

A deeper dive will customize this for our launch, but this is enough to test the basic frameworks for getting geojson.io running.

Extra note– as far as I can tell, there’s some Jekyll magic going on too, so it maybe simple to post this on github as well.

Anyone gotten any further with this? Any tips and tricks?