Nightscout setup guide for dummies

a. Navigate to GitHub.com. Fill in your email, your desired username and password and click “Sign Up for GitHub”.

b. Verify your account by solving the puzzle. After verification is complete, click “Join a free plan”.

c. Select the options that match your profile (not important for the setup, it’s not mandatory to click any) and click “Complete setup” button.

d. In order for the account to be activated, you should verify your email address.

e. Go to your inbox, find the email from GitHub and click the embedded verification link.

f. Your email is now confirmed. Skip the next step.

g. Your GitHub account is now created and active. Your GitHub homepage should now look like this.

Your GitHub account is now ready. Please leave the browser tab open.

a. On another browser tab, navigate to https://signup.heroku.com/ to create a new Heroku account. Fill in the mandatory fields (*) and click “CREATE FREE ACCOUNT” button.

b. Verify your Heroku account. Go to your email inbox and check for an email verification from Heroku. Click on the verification link.

c. Your Heroku account is now activated. Setup your desired password and click “SET PASSWORD AND LOGIN” button.

d. If this message appears, your Heroku account is ready. On the next page accept the Terms of Service.

e. Navigate to Heroku “Account Settings” from the top right menu.

f. In order to use Heroku services you should setup a payment method. Therefore you should add a valid credit card by clicking the “Add credit card” button.
NOTE: This is only for verification purposes. You will only be charged if you use Heroku billable features. A typical Nightscout setup uses non-billable features.

g. Add your valid credit card details and click on the Save Details button.

Your Heroku account is now ready. Please leave the browser tab open.

a. Open another browser tab and navigate to MongoDB Atlas. Click the Start Free button on the homepage.

b. Enter your details, accept the terms and click on “Get started free” button.

c. You may skip the next step below by clicking the Skip button.

d. Click the button “Create a cluster” in the column “Shared Clusters“.

e. Leave the default selections and proceed by clicking the Create Cluster button on the bottom right of the page.

f. Your cluster is being created. This process takes a few minutes so please be patient.

g. Click on CONNECT button, after the cluster creation process has finished.

h. Click on Allow Access from Anywhere.

i. Click on Add IP Address button.

j. Create a database user. Enter your desired database username and your desired database password. Take note of them as you will need them later on. Click on the Create Database User button when finished and then click the Choose Connection Method.

k. Choose “Connect your application“

l. Copy the connection string by clicking the Copy button. Paste the string on a notepad and follow the guidance below in order to replace the username and password on the string with the ones that you have set on step 3j above.

NOTE: The final Connection String will be your MONGODB_URI. Save it for later use!

a. Navigate to https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor. Ensure that you are logged in to GitHub. Click on the Fork button.

b. Please wait until forking is finished.

c. Scroll down and click “Deploy to Heroku” button.

d. Choose an app name for your Heroku site. Choose something that you will remember as it will be part of the URL you will be using to enter your nightscout site.
For example the URL format will be: https://yourappsname.herokuapp.com, so choose something easy to remember and type.

Do not change the region on the field below.

e. Scroll down until you find API_SECRET. This is required to continue and will be your Nightscout password. A passphrase that must be at least 12 characters long. Avoid ‘special‘ characters.

f. Set the DISPLAY_UNITS you will be using to display your BG. Values can be either mg/dl or mmol.

g. Set the ENABLE values. These are various plugins that will add more features to your Nightscout site. These will be documented in detail on another article. For now you can add all of them. Simply copy-paste the following line.

careportal basal dbsize rawbg iob maker bridge cob bwp cage iage sage boluscalc pushover treatmentnotify mmconnect loop pump profile food openaps bage alexa override

NOTE: Enabling all plugins does not mean that all of them will work by default. Some of them will, but some of them need further configuration.

h. Copy the connection string that you have created in step 3l above in the MONGODB_URI field. Don’t paste the URL below, as this is an example. You should replace the parts in red color with the correct ones that your string has.
Example URI:
mongodb+srv://yourusername:yourpassword@cluster0.xxxxx.mongodb.net/?retryWrites=true&w=majority

j. Deploy app by clicking the respective button.

k. Exercise your patience as the progress might take a few minutes. Once the deployment has finished click the View button.

l. For Dexcom users you have to connect Nightscout with Dexcom servers in order to pull the data.

Please follow the steps below:
1. Go to Heroku
2. Choose your app you have just created.
3. Click the gear icon.
4. Select Reveal Config Vars button to reveal Heroku variables.
5. Find ENABLE and add in the values next to it the word bridge, in order to add the bridge plugin. You have to click the pencil icon to enable editing. This will eventually bridge Nightscout with your Dexcom Share.
6. Find BRIDGE_USER_NAME and add as a value your Dexcom username (the one you use for Dexcom account, Clarity etc)
7. Find BRIDGE_PASSWORD and as a value add your Dexcom password.
8. Find BRIDGE_SERVER and as a value add EU if you are in Europe or leave the default blank value to pull data from Dexcom US servers.
9. Your settings are automatically saved.
10. Exit Heroku and leave some time for Nightscout to collect the data.
NOTE: There are more parameters to customize if possible but you have to manually add the respective parameters in HEROKU. More details on official Nightscout page: https://nightscout.github.io/nightscout/setup_variables/#bridge-share2nightscout-bridge

Your new Nightscout site is now live! We are not over yet. We have to edit some settings on the frontend.

a. Click OK on the pop up window “Redirecting you to the Profile Editor to create a new profile.”

b. Change the timezone

Timezone: [Select your timezone]

c. Scroll down and click the Authenticate link. A Device Authentication pop up window will open. Fill in your API_SECRET you have used while setting up Heroku and then click the Update button.

NOTE: If the API_SECRET you have entered is correct (and not misspelled for example) you will now see the message Admin Authorized.

d. Click Save button. In the top right part of your Nightscout site you will now see the message Status: SUCCESS which means that the settings were successfully saved.

Your Nightscout site is now online. You should now configure your uploader in order to push the CGM data to Nightscout. There are multiple ways to achieve it depending the device you are using. Below you can see a very comprehensive diagram with almost all the ways that someone can upload his BG data to the Cloud.

Ways to get your CGM data in the Cloud – Source: Nightscout.info