NeighborShare Backend

The project will build a NodeJS application with JavaScript. Node and Express are used in the backend with JavaScript. MongoDB is used as the database to persist data.

Table of contents

---

• Description
• Installation
• Docker Setup

Description

---

The project is a NodeJs application with JavaScript as the language. The project uses npm as the package manager.

Installation

---

First run the following command to use npm to install the packages.

npm install

Running the application

Before running the application, you need to configure the database connection string in .env file in the root directory of the project. In the .env.example that you can already find in the root directory, there is an example with description in it on how to put the connection string to the right place.

Make sure that the database instance is running.

When these are all properly configured, run one of the following commands to start the application.

# watch mode during development
npm run dev

or

# production mode
npm start

Note: Database transactions are used for this application. Please make sure that the database instance that you use for this application supoprts transactions. e.g. MongoDB Atlas supports it.

Docker Setup

---

There are two docker files in this project. They are:

• Dockerfile: you can find this file in the root directory of the project. This is the docker file for the backend application.
• docker-compose.yml: this is the docker compose file for the backend and database. You can find this file in the root directory of the project.
• start.sh: this is a script for building the docker images and running the docker containers in one click.

For running the application using docker, please first make sure that you have docker installed on your computer. Then run the following two commands:

# Build the Docker images
docker-compose build

then

# Start the containers
docker-compose up

Note: If the docker containers cannot be started properly, please delete your node_modules directory and your package-lock.json file.

Example Credentials

---

Creating a user

When the application is properly running, use e.g. Postman to do a POST call to localhost:3000/users, with a request body like this example:

{
    "name":"John Doe",
    "email":"[email protected]",
    "password":"sample-password"
}

Then a user is created.

Logging in

To log in, do a POST call to localhost:3000/credentials with the email and password of the user you just created in the request body as the example below:

{
    "email":"[email protected]",
    "password":"sample-password"
}

You will then receive a JWT in the response. You can then include the JWT you receive in the authorization header of other calls to authorize.

Database credentials

I have already set up a MongoDB Atlas cluster that can be used for testing the application. The connection sting is:

mongodb+srv://chenyb0417:[email protected]/?retryWrites=true&w=majority&appName=ClusterFree

Copy and past this connection string to the .env file in the root directory to set up the database connection to this application.