Using Ampt to schedule Vestaboard messages

Ampt is a Serverless framework that inverts the infrastructure as code paradigm to an even more intuitive idea of infrastructure in code. This allows you to quickly create scalable applications without the overhead of provisioning resources.

As of today, Ampt is officially launching to the public. We have been using Ampt at Vestaboard for several months now to simplify our infrastructure and as the backbone for many of our new Vestaboard+ features. The launch of Ampt is an excellent opportunity to showcase how simple it is to schedule and automate Vestaboard messages on a cadence.

Get Started with Ampt

The first thing to do is sign up for your own Ampt account. From there, you just need to install the Ampt CLI by running:

npm i -g @ampt/cli
ampt

Initially, this will prompt you to log in to your Ampt account. After you have, you can select "Create new app" from the CLI and choose a starter template. For our purpose, we'll go with "TypeScript API (Express)." We can name the app whatever we want, so how about something like "vestaboard-custom-clock" and we're all set. Ampt will spin up a new application and even start up a developer sandbox for you that is a fully operational serverless project.

In the root of your newly created project, there will be an index.ts file. Go ahead and delete all the code in there and import the task from Ampt. We'll use that to schedule a task. To make sure it's working as expected, you can just drop in a console.log. Let's make a task that logs every 1 minute:

import { task } from "@ampt/sdk";

task("vestaboard-clock", async (event) => {
  const timestamp = `${new Date().toDateString()} ${new Date().toLocaleTimeString()}`;
  console.log(`It is ${timestamp}`);
}).every("1 minute");

This will log every 1 minute with something like:

It is Mon Sep 18 2023 1:34:16 PM

It is important to note that you can also use tasks with a cron expression or to run a task once at a specific time. If you want to explore more options, check out the Ampt documentation.

Send a Message to your Vestaboard

Now, we just need to send a message to your Vestaboard when the scheduled task is fired. The first step is to enable the Vestaboard Read/Write API in order to get your token.

Ampt has a dashboard at https://ampt.dev/ where you can query data, set environment variables, see production logs and more. Since the Read/Write API token is a secret, you don't want to store that in your code, but instead, you'll want to add it as an environment variable in the "parameters" tab of the Ampt dashboard. Let's call it VESTABOARD_TOKEN. You can access it in code using the params export:

import { task, params } from "@ampt/sdk";

task("vestaboard-clock", async (event) => {
  const VESTABOARD_TOKEN = params("VESTABOARD_TOKEN");
  const timestamp = `${new Date().toDateString()} ${new Date().toLocaleTimeString()}`;
  console.log(`It is ${timestamp}`);
}).every("1 minute");

Now, we just need to install a fetch package:

npm i fetch@2 --save

and make a request to the Read/Write API with our token:

import { task, params } from "@ampt/sdk";

task("vestaboard-clock", async (event) => {
  const VESTABOARD_TOKEN = params("VESTABOARD_TOKEN");
  const timestamp = `${new Date().toDateString()} ${new Date().toLocaleTimeString()}`;

  await fetch("https://rw.vestaboard.com/", {
    body: JSON.stringify({ text: `It is ${timestamp}` }),
    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
      "X-Vestaboard-Read-Write-Key": VESTABOARD_TOKEN,
    },
    method: "POST",
  });
}).every("1 minute");

That's it. With just a few lines of code, you've set up a scheduled task in Ampt that automates your Vestaboard. Imagine the possibilities!

If you'd like, you can clone our repo on GitHub with a full working example.