Book Recommendation App

This is a Node.js Express application for searching different books by title, author, subject using Open Library API, saving favorite books to personal library and adding rating and review to favorite books.

One of it's major features is recommending books to users based on their previous ratings by relying on ratings of other users for similar books and computing a similariy index between the users using a variation of Jaccard index formula and recommending books based on this similariy index. It supports user authentication using auth and refresh tokens with email support.

Table of contents:

• Pre-reqs
• Getting started
• Project Structure
• Dependencies
  • dependencies
  • devDependencies

Pre-reqs

To build and run this app locally you will need a few things:

• Install Node.js
• Install PostgreSQL
• Install VS Code

Getting started

• Clone the repository

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Chimise/Book-Recommendation-App.git <project_name>

• Install dependencies

cd <project_name>
npm install

• Install Knex Migration CLI

# install knex migration cli
npm install knex -g

• Create a User and a Database

# Change user to postgres
sudo -u postgres psql
# Create Database 
CREATE DATABASE <mydb>;
# Create User
CREATE USER <myUser> WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD <'mypass'>;
# Grant Database Access to User
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE <mydb> TO <myUser>;

• Build and run the project

# Emit Javascript files from the Typescript source file
npm run build
# Run knex migration files
knex migrate:run --knexfile ./dist/util/knexFile.js
# Start the server
npm start

Project Structure

The full folder structure of this app is explained below:

Name	Description
dist	Contains the Javascript files emitted from Typescript, this is the code that will be deployed
node_modules	Contains all your npm dependencies
knex	Contains migrations and seeds
knex/migrations	Contains knex migrations files
src	Contains your source code that will be compiled to the dist dir
src/config	Contains enviroment and logging configurations for the project
src/controllers	Controllers define functions that respond to various http requests
src/interfaces	Contains Model Schemas and other types used in the application
src/middlewares	Contains authentication and validation middlewares to process request before they are handled by the controller
src/models	Models define database schema that will be used in storing and retrieving data from Postgresql
src/routes	Contains files mapping routes to controllers
src/services	Contains files that handle specific logics and used in the controller
src/util	Utility files for sending emails and adding specific functionalities to the app
src/validators	Yup schema object validators
src/server.ts	Entry point to your express app
templates	Email Html Templates
.env.example	API keys, tokens, passwords, database URI. Clone this, but don't check it in to public repos.
package.json	File that contains npm dependencies as well as [build scripts]
tsconfig.json	Config settings for compiling server code written in TypeScript

Dependencies

Dependencies are managed through package.json. In that file you'll find two sections:

dependencies

Package	Description
bcryptjs	Library for hashing and salting user passwords.
body-parser	Express 4 middleware.
cors	Express 4 middleware.
dotenv	Loads environment variables from .env file.
express	Node.js web framework.
yup	Schema validation library
lodash	General utility library.
nodemailer	Node.js library for sending emails.
jsonwebtoken	Json Web token Library
winston	Logging library
pg	Node.js Postgresql native driver
knex	SQL query builder
node-fetch	Fetch API Implementation for Node.js

devDependencies

Package	Description
@types	Dependencies in this folder are .d.ts files used to provide types
concurrently	Utility that manages multiple concurrent tasks. Used with npm scripts
nodemon	Utility that automatically restarts node process when it crashes
typescript	JavaScript compiler/type checker that boosts JavaScript productivity

To install or update these dependencies you can use npm install or npm update.