MMM-birthdays

A birthday reminder module for MichMich's MagicMirror.

Installation

• Navigate to your MagicMirror modules folder and clone this repository using: git clone https://github.com/amitchone/MMM-birthdays.git
• Change directory to MMM-birthdays via cd MMM-birthdays/
• Run npm install to install the necessary third-party packages

Configuration & Usage

This module is intended to be extremely simple to use and therefore only provides a small set of configurable parameters:

Option	Description	Default
notify_days_before	Number of days before birthday that notifications should start to be shown - any value greater than 365 will be floored to 365. Set to 0 to only show birthdays on the day	14
update_interval	Number of seconds between updating displayed birthdays	600
opacity	A boolean option to indicate whether subsequent birthday rows beyond three should fade out (think weather forecast module) or not	true
title	A string to show as the header	birthdays
locale	A string used to set language for module (not case-sensitive): English: en_GB French: fr_FR German: de_DE Spanish: es_ES Italian: it_IT	en_GB
birthdays	An array of birthdays objects as described below	See below
show_no_birthdays	A boolean option to indicate whether to show the header and a message when there are no upcoming birthdays.	true

So, the default config.js entry for this module could look like this:

{
    module: "MMM-birthdays",
    position: "top_right",
    config: {
        notify_days_before: 14,
        update_interval: 600,
        opacity: true,
        title: "Our Birthdays",
        locale: "en_GB",
        show_no_birthdays: true
    }
}

Birthdays Array

The birthdays array is a list of JSON objects containing the following fields (if you have to list a lot of birthdays it can also be a separate file instead, see the birthdays.json section):

Option	Description	Example
name	Name of person (or animal) who's birthday to track	"Adam"
dob	Date of birth in RFC 2822 date format "YYYY-MM-DD"	"2000-12-25" would be the 25th December 2000

As this is an array, it can contain multiple birthdays objects. The example below states that Adam's birthday is on 25th December 2000 and Bob's is on 13th January 2023:

{
    module: "MMM-birthdays",
    position: "top_right",
    config: {
        notify_days_before: 14,
        update_interval: 600,
        opacity: true,
        title: "Our Birthdays",
        locale: "en_GB",
        show_no_birthdays: true,
        birthdays: [
            {
                name: "Adam",
                dob: "2000-12-25"
            },
            {
                name: "Bob",
                dob: "2023-01-13"
            }
        ]
    }
}

birthdays.json

You probably know a lot of people and so listing them all in config.js would make the file look rather messy. So, this module checks for the presence of a file named birthdays.json in the MMM-birthdays/ directory. If it exists, this file takes precedence over any birthdays configuration parameter specified in config.js and means that you don't have to specify any birthdays entries in config.js.

The equivalent specification for Adam and Bob's birthdays in the previous example in birthdays.json is as follows - note specifically the additional " marks around the property names as this is JSON, not Javascript:

{
    "birthdays": [
        {
            "name": "Adam",
            "dob": "2000-12-25"
        },
        {
            "name": "Bob",
            "dob": "2023-01-13"
        }
    ]
}