placequery

Simple node.js web server that acts as an interface to the [placesindex] (https://github.com/oss/placesindex) completer.

Accepts GET requests as queries and uses the JSend spec for responses.

Setup

Make a copy of config.yaml.sample, adjust it to suit your server configuration, and save it as config.yaml in the same directory as placequery.js.

Permissions

You may need to start the server as root to bind to a certain port or read SSL keys on startup. If you start the server with sudo, it will automatically set its UID and GID to that of the user who ran sudo after reading the keys and binding to a port. Alternatively, you can define a UID and GID for the server to use in config.yaml.

SSL

Encryption is desirable if you believe certain requests to the server will reveal a user's geographic location.

To enable SSL directly, set server.ssl.enabled to true in config.yaml and provide paths for the key and cert files, where key contains the private key of the server in PEM format and cert contains the certificate key of the server in PEM format. If you need more details, see the Node.js SSL documentation.

Alternatively, see Integration with web service for a way to tunnel traffic between the end user and a host already configured for HTTPS.

Usage

Queries are made with GET requests to the server's root directory, e.g. http://localhost:8080/?search=hill. To make nicer requests like http://localhost/pq?search=hill, see Integration with web service.

Search by title, building code, or ID

http://localhost/pq?search=old returns:

{
    "status": "success",
    "data": {
        "places": [
            {
                "title": "Old Gibbons Garage",
                "id": "8435_5455Old Gibbons Garage"
            },
            {
                "title": "Old Queens",
                "id": "3000_4595Old Queens"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Search by location

http://localhost/pq?latitude=40.498760&longitude=-74.446266 returns:

{
    "status": "success",
    "data": {
        "places": [
            {
                "title": "Old Queens",
                "id": "3000_4595Old Queens"
            },
            {
                "title": "Geology Hall",
                "id": "3002_4597Geology Hall"
            },
            {
                "title": "Van Nest Hall",
                "id": "3001_4596Van Nest Hall"
            },
            ...
        ]
    }
}

Get single place

With IDs returned in the search results you can get the full JSON entry for a particular building.

http://localhost/pq?id=3000_4595Old%20Queens returns:

{
    "status": "success",
    "data": {
        "place": {
            "title": "Old Queens",
            "description": "Old Queens, originally called the Queens Building...",
            "cid": "C71741",
            "building_id": "4595",
            "building_number": "3000",
            "campus_code": "10",
            "campus_name": "College Avenue",
            "location": {
              ...
            },
            "offices": [
              ...
            ],
            "id": "3000_4595Old Queens"
        }
    }
}

Integration with web service

You can make the placequery server look like it's part of your Apache service by adding something like this to your httpd.conf (adjust the port and domain to match the settings in config.yaml):

ProxyPass /pq http://localhost:8080/

Make sure these lines are present and uncommented:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

Now you can make requests with http://localhost/pq?search=hill instead of http://localhost:8080/?search=hill.

This is also an easy way to provide SSL capability for placequery: add the ProxyPass directives to the configuration of an HTTPS-enabled (virtual) host, and traffic between the end user and your gateway server will be encrypted. Ensure that backend communications between the gateway and placequery server are safe.

See Apache's mod proxy documentation for more info.