Vestabuddy

Libraries for posting a temporary message to a Vestaboard and then resetting it to the previous layout. This is helpful for services that want to post an announcement to a Vestaboard via a web hook.

Vestabuddy is built on Convex. You can set it up via:

npm i
npx convex init

and then either run in dev via:

npm run dev

or push to via:

npx convex deploy

This repo also contains a very basic web UI that can be used to post messages. You don't need a hosting service to run it if you don't need the web UI and just want to interface with the webhooks, which run natively on Convex.

Configuration

The app requires the VESTA_RW_KEY environment variable to be set in the Convex dashboard. This key is available under the Read/Write API tab in the API section of https://web.vestaboard.com/.

Service keys

You can use a service key to authenticate with Vestabuddy from a third party service that doesn't have a web auth context. Use the internal mutation addServiceKey on the Convex dashboard or via the CLI to create a service key:

npx convex run auth:addServiceKey '{"name": "my-service"}'

This will return a secret key that you can use to authenticate with Vestabuddy.

Note: Reminder that in all of these cli commands you can use --prod to run them in production instead of on your dev deployment.

Posting from a web hook

You can post to the /post http endpoint with a service key to post a message. e.g., if you have a service key 91480b96-71af-413b-102d-aa011e245149 and your Convex deployment name lonely-cow-123 you can post a message via CURL with:

curl -X POST https://lonely-cow-123.convex.site/post \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{
           "message": "moo",
           "duration": 60,
           "serviceKey": "91480b96-71af-413b-102d-aa011e245149"
         }'

Note the .site domain suffix. Convex http actions are hosted at convex.site instead of convex.cloud for security reasons.

Posting from the CLI

The CLI can directly call internal actions so you can skip the service key:

npx convex run --prod board:postAuthed '{"message": "boo", "duration": 60}'