@ninjabreadman This was very helpful to get a node helper function up and running. I am able to receive a socket notification and run a function based on the notification. My program in the node helper currently looks like

activateShell: function(){
     console.log("Activating shell");
     exec("/Test -s");
}

I receive the activating shell in the console but the script (a simple echo “Hello World”) does not execute. I’ve tried placing it in my module folder, the Magic Mirror folder, and as a path in the desktop, all to no avail. Would you have any ideas on what is wrong?

@cirdan Thank you for this tidbit. I was aware that I would need a node helper. I think my preferred course would be to call the php file from the node helper. I will eventually need to also call a bash script from my node helper if possible as well. Do you know of a module that does a similar call that I could look at for reference?

Hello! I am quite new to MagicMirror and trying to display personal data from a MySQL database (stored on amazon cloud) in text and graphs on my mirror. I currently have a mixture of html and php files to access the data and display on a website. I would like to transfer the functionality but am unsure how to do so in a compatible way.
I currently doing so with php:

	$db = mysqli_connect(REDACTED) or die('Error connecting to MySQL server.');
	//the SQL query to be executed
	$query = "SELECT * FROM table";
	//storing the result of the executed query
	$result = $db->query($query);
	//initialize the array to store the processed data
	$jsonArray = array();
	//check if there is any data returned by the SQL Query
	if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
	  //Converting the results into an associative array
	  while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
		  $date= $row['timestamp'];
	    $jsonArrayItem = array();
	    $jsonArrayItem['label'] = $date;
	    $jsonArrayItem['value'] = $row['columnName'];
	    //append the above created object into the main array.
	    array_push($jsonArray, $jsonArrayItem);
	  }
	}
	//Closing the connection to DB
	$db->close();
	//set the response content type as JSON
	header('Content-type: application/json');
	//output the return value of json encode using the echo function. 
	echo json_encode($jsonArray);
?>

And then displaying with Fusion charts:

$(function(){
	  $.ajax({
	    url: 'http://REDACTED',
	    type: 'GET',
	    success : function(data) {
	      chart1Data = data;
	      var chart4Properties = {
	        "caption": " ",
	        "xAxisName": "Date",
	        "yAxisName": " ",
	        "rotatevalues": "1",
	        "theme": "zune"
	      };
	      api4Chart = new FusionCharts({
	        type: 'column2d',
	        renderAt: 'chart4-container',
	        width: '550',
	        height: '350',
	        dataFormat: 'json',
	        dataSource: {
	          "chart": chart4Properties,
	          "data": chart1Data
	        }
	      });
	      api4Chart.render();
	    }
	  });
	});

Any help would be appreciated. If there is any other information I can provide, please let me know. Thank you :)