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Acebook MERN Template

In this project, you are task with working on an existing application. A significant part of the challenge will be to familiarise yourself with the codebase you've inherited, as you work to improve and extend it.

Structure

This repo contains two applications:

  • A frontend React App
  • A backend api server

These two applications will communicate through HTTP requests, and need to be run separately.

Documentation

More documentation of the codebase and its architecture can be found here. It's recommended you all read the suggested docs after making sure the whole setup below worked for everyone. Then work together on a diagram describing how the application works.

Card wall

REPLACE THIS TEXT WITH A LINK TO YOUR CARD WALL

Quickstart

Install Node.js

If you haven't already, make sure you have node and NVM installed.

  1. Install Node Version Manager (NVM) 
    brew install nvm
    Then follow the instructions to update your ~/.bash_profile.
  2. Open a new terminal
  3. Install the latest version of Node.js, (20.5.0 at time of writing). 
    nvm install 20

Set up your project

  1. Have one team member fork this repository

  2. Rename the fork to acebook-<team name>

  3. Every team member clone the fork to their local machine

  4. Install dependencies for both the frontend and api applications:

    cd frontend
npm install
cd ../api
npm install

  5. Install an ESLint plugin for your editor, for example ESLint for VSCode

  6. Install MongoDB

    brew tap mongodb/brew
brew install [email protected]

    Note: If you see a message that says If you need to have [email protected] first in your PATH, run:, follow the instruction. Restart your terminal after this.

  7. Start MongoDB

    brew services start [email protected]

Setting up environment variables.

We need to create two .env files, one in the frontend and one in the api.

Frontend

Create a file frontend/.env with the following contents:

VITE_BACKEND_URL="http://localhost:3000"

Backend

Create a file api/.env with the following contents:

MONGODB_URL="mongodb://0.0.0.0/acebook"
NODE_ENV="development"
JWT_SECRET="secret"

For an explanation of these environment variables, see the documentation.

How to run the server and use the app

  1. Start the server application (in the api directory) in dev mode:
; cd api
; npm run dev
  1. Start the front end application (in the frontend directory)

In a new terminal session...

; cd frontend
; npm run dev

You should now be able to open your browser and go to http://localhost:5174/signup to create a new user.

Then, after signing up, you should be able to log in by going to http://localhost:5174/login.

After logging in, you won't see much but you can create posts using PostMan and they should then show up in the browser if you refresh the page.