Author: Dan Brian Version: 1.0.0

Local Shakes is a Node app that allows you to receive text messages about recent earthquakes in your local area. The app uses the USGS API to monitor for earthquakes and the Twilio API to send text messages when the app detects a new earthquake. The app checks for new quakes every 60 seconds.

Because the USGS often updates earthquakes with new information and the API presents updated earthquakes as new, the app stores the IDs of the previous 10 earthquakes in an array and then checks the ID of any new quakes against the list of stored IDs. This keeps the app from sending multiple text messages about the same earthquake.

• npm node installed on your local machine or server.

• nodemon installed on your local machine for local testing.

• An active Twilio account with an outgoing phone number or message service ID.

• The latitude and longitude of the location you would like to monitor for earthquakes. You can find these coordinates using Maps.ie.

To install Local Shakes, first fork this repository. Once you have forked the repository, clone it using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/<YOUR-GIT-USERNAME>/local-shakes.git

Once cloned, navigate to the local-shakes directory on your local machine and install the app's dependencies:

npm install

Next, open the .env.sample file in a text editor and update the values of each variable with your Twilio credentials and the phone number you would like the app to text. Save the file as .env in the root directory of the app. The PHONE_NUMBER_TO_TEXT value should be a ten digit phone number starting with 1, such as 16036661075.

After adding your Twilio crendentials to the .env file, open the src/index.cjs file and replace the values for the yourLatitude, yourLongitude, yourTimezone, and radius variables with your desired values.

The yourTimezone variable defines your UTC offsets. The offsets for EST, CST, MST, and PST are -05:00, -06:00, -07:00, and -08:00, respectively. These values may be different depending on your region's use of Daylight Savings Time.

Save the changes to the file and run the app with node:

node src/index.cjs

The app runs on your local machine and checks for new earthquakes in the defined location every 60 seconds.

You can deploy this app on a service like DigitalOcean's App Platform or Heroku.

When you deploy the app on a cloud service, you need to add the app's environment variables (the ones in the .env file) to the service you deploy on. Review your service's documentation to see how this is done.

If you are deploying this on a Linux virtual machine (VM), such as a DigitalOcean Droplet, you can install this tool using the same steps above. To keep the script running in perpetuity on the VM, run the screen command to create virtual terminal for the script and then run the script normally with node src/index.cjs. screen allows you to disconnect from the VM without stopping the script.

When you reconnect to the VM, you can open the virtual terminal the script is running in by running screen -r.

Local Shakes is licensed under Creative Commons. You can do whatever you want with it.

04-4-2022 - Pushed version 1.0.

Twitter support: I hope to provide the app with Twitter support by the end of April 2022. This will allow the app to post earthquake updates to your account.