Meningitis App Scheduler

This is a custom script to schedule the execution of the MeningitisApp app. For online instances/deployments of DHIS2 it can be run from anywhere, but for offline ones should be run from each offline server.

How to run the script

1. Install node.js from here https://nodejs.org/ or check if you already have an instance running with which node
2. Clone https://github.com/velasvalen17/meningitis-scheduler.git
3. Give full permissions to your user over the cloned folder with sudo chown <user>:<user> ./meningitis-scheduler
4. Install Puppeteer dependencies in the new folder you have just cloned with npm i puppeteer
5. Edit constants.js and add the user, pass and server url information for the specific server you are going to access
6. Run the script with npm run start
7. After a few seconds an image called "example.png" should have appeared in your cloned folder. Check it out to see MeningitisApp executed.

How to schedule

In order to schedule the execution, we need to create a task in the crontab manager:

1. Open the crontab manager with sudo crontab -e
2. Add this line as example to execute the script every minute: * * * * * cd /home/ehas/meningitis-scheduler && /usr/bin/node ./scheduler.js
3. This line will execute ./scheduler from its folder with /usr/bin/node (which is the usual place where node is)
4. If you want to try the crontask on demand, you can install cronitor from here: https://cronitor.io/docs/using-cronitor-cli and once is installed you can execute a selected crontask with the command sudo cronitor select
5. For Windows OS it should be done with "Task Scheduler" instead of crontab, but following the same principles

Features

• The main method is in scheduler.js but we have enabled another file for env variables as {user, password, homeurl, appurl} called constants.js, so these can be changed without editing the main method.
• Puppeteer downloads a light version of Chrome browser called Chromium, so it can execute it in a headless mode and render all the react code from MeningitisApp. For debugging purposes, Puppeteer can execute Chromium with UI modifying the schedule.js code like this:

  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: false, //add this line
    args: ["--no-sandbox"],
  });

What the script looks like

This is how it looks like when it is executed with headless attribute set to false:

Dependencies

• nodejs
• puppeteer
• cronitor --optional