Throughout an InfluxData inner hackathon, I used to be seeking to work on a mission that will assist me strengthen my Telegraf and Flux abilities. I additionally needed to make use of InfluxData’s Giraffe to visualise my mission in a React utility. After studying Sean Brickley’s weblog publish on monitoring the Worldwide House Station with InfluxDB, I used to be impressed to construct on this concept. So I landed on constructing a React utility that might observe the ISS’s place reside and doc its journey utilizing InfluxDB, ExpressJS, Telegraf, and Giraffe.

There are three major parts for this mission:

1. The Telegraf config
2. The ExpressJS API server
3. The React utility

Let’s begin with the Telegraf config.

Like Sean, I used a public API to get the present place of the ISS. My plan was to make use of Telegraf to ballot this API, parse the coordinate information, and ship this location info to InfluxDB. I used Telegraf’s HTTP plug-in to realize this. The subsequent step was to parse the coordinate info from the JSON and convert the strings into floats. This may be completed with Telegraf’s Converter plug-in. And at last, I wanted to ship my location information to my InfluxDB cloud occasion working in AWS. Naturally, that is simply achieved with Telegraf’s InfluxDB plug-in. The first step full! Now we are able to run telegraf --config ./telegraf/iss.conf and begin accumulating the ISS’s location.

Now that we’re starting to gather some information, the subsequent step is querying it. I made a decision to construct an API utilizing ExpressJS and to question my InfluxDB occasion utilizing the InfluxDB JS consumer. The objective right here is to construct an API that the React app can use to retrieve the placement information that it might want to visualize the ISS’s flight path utilizing Giraffe.

First we have to hook up with InfluxDB, and we are able to do this by passing our URL and token to the InfluxDB object. Since we’re going to make use of the consumer to run queries, we have to get the Question API object. In case you needed to get bucket info, for instance, you’d need to get the Bucket API object as a substitute.

const influxDB = new InfluxDB({ url: baseURL, token: influxToken })
const queryApi = influxDB.getQueryApi(orgID)

Subsequent, we are able to use the InfluxDB JS consumer to question our InfluxDB occasion like so:

app.get('/iss, (_, res) => {
 let csv = ''
 const issQuery = `todo`
 let clientQuery = flux``+issQuery
 queryApi.queryLines(clientQuery, {
   subsequent(line) {
     csv = `${csv}${line}n`;
   },
   error(error) {
     console.error(error)
     console.log('nFinished /iss ERROR')
     res.finish()
   },
   full() {
     console.log('nFinished /iss SUCCESS')
     res.finish(JSON.stringify({ csv }))
   },
 })
})

This route will use the Question API object from the InfluxDB consumer to execute our question (which we haven’t outlined but). We’ll use the queryLines operate to get our response again line by line. The ensuing string shall be a csv response that Giraffe can perceive.