phant

Phant is No Longer in Operation

Unfortunately Phant, our data-streaming service, is no longer in service and has been discontinued. The system has reached capacity and, like a less-adventurous Cassini, has plunged conclusively into a fiery and permanent retirement. There are several other maker-friendly, data-streaming services and/or IoT platforms available as alternatives. The three we recommend are Blynk, ThingSpeak, and Cayenne. You can read our blog post on the topic for an overview and helpful links for each platform.

All secondary SparkFun repositories related to Phant have been archived and pulled in as a subtree in the main Phant GitHub repository.

phant is a modular logging tool developed by SparkFun Electronics for collecting data from the Internet of Things. phant is the open source software that powers data.sparkfun.com.

If you would like to learn more about phant, please visit phant.io for usage & API docs.

Getting Started

Vagrant

Vagrant is a headless virtual machine that can be run on many different systems. Vagrant is a safe and easy way to run phant without the need to greatly modify your current system (see Why Vagrant?).

Vagrant Setup:

Install VirtualBox
Install Vagrant
Install Git
git clone https://github.com/sparkfun/phant.git
cd phant && vagrant up --provision
phant is now available via http on port 8080 and telnet via port 8081

To restart phant use vagrant provision from inside the phant directory.

To stop the vagrant virtual machine use vagrant halt from inside the phant directory.

To restart vagrant use vagrant up --provision from inside the phant directory.

Local

phant is a npm package, and requires the latest version of node.js.

Once you have node.js installed, you can install phant by running npm install -g phant from your favorite terminal. Using the -g (global) flag will make the phant executable available in your PATH.

Now you can start phant:

$ phant
phant http server running on port 8080
phant telnet server running on port 8081

This launches a telnet server for stream creation, and a http server for data input & output. You can now open a separate window, and you should be able to create a stream by connecting to the local telnet server.

$ telnet localhost 8081
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
            .-.._
      __  /`     '.
   .-'  `/   (   a \
  /      (    \,_   \
 /|       '---` |\ =|
` \    /__.-/  /  | |
   |  / / \ \  \   \_\  jgs
   |__|_|  |_|__\
   never   forget.

Welcome to phant!
Type 'help' for a list of available commands

phant>

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

sparkfun / phant