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back-end

README.md

SCHED-IT | Back-End

The back-end for this web-appication is written in JavaScript using the Node.js framework. It runs on an ExpressJS server

Contents

  • node_modules - This directory is listed under .gitignore so it is not tracked by git. This folder contains all the project dependencies.
  • controllers - This directory houses all the methods that are responsible of responding to HTTP requests and makes queries to the MongoDB database using the defined Mongoose models.
  • models - This directory houses all Mongoose Schema Models. Instances of these models contain the Mongoose methods to invoke a query to the MongoDB database.
  • package.json - This file contains the application's project details, scripts, and dependencies. This was auto-genrated by the npx script, create-react-app.
  • API-README.md - (Deprecated, do not use) This file is the documentation of the available back-end API endpoints.

Installation & Setup

  1. Picking up from the install guide in the main README (npm dependencies should already be installed at this point), we now need to set-up our environment variables. Create a file named .env and fill in the following information: 
    PORT=                   # [Optional] Use this variable to define a custom port to run on (default 3000)
SESSION_SECRET=         # [Required] Define your session-cookie secret key here
MAX_COOKIE_AGE=         # [Optional] Define your custom cookie validity age in milliseconds (default 1.21e+9)
MONGO_URI=              # [Required] Define your MongoDB instance connection string
ENABLE_LOGGER=          # [Optional] Define a boolean value (0 or 1) to enable or disable the request logger (default 0)
CORS_WHITELIST=         # [Required] Define a JSON array containing the hostnames of the cors-whitelist i.e. ["http://localhost"]
SMTP_HOST=              # [Required] Define the SMTP Host For Outgoing Emails
SMTP_PORT=              # [Required] Define the SMTP Port for Outgoing Emails (default 587)
SMTP_USER=              # [Required] Define the SMTP User Credentials for Outgoing Emails
SMTP_PASS=              # [Required] Define the SMTP Password Paired with User Credentials
NODE_ENV=               # [Optional] Define environment the server is running on [development, production] (default 'development')

Running the Application

After installing the required dependencies via npm, run the express server:

OPTION 1:

# Starts using node
npm start

OPTION 2:

# Starts using nodemon (if you have nodemon installed globally)
npm run start-dev

Handling Mock-Data (deprecated)

Mock data can be inserted or purged automatically using the following pre-made scripts:

  1. Add mock data to the MongoDB instance: 
    npm run populateDB
  2. Purge all data from the MongoDB instance: 
    npm run purgeDB

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

This application is configured to handle CORS via a whitelist of allowed hostnames to access the back-end server resources. This whitelist must be defined as a JSON array using the CORS_WHITELIST environment variable. Only hostnames listed in the whitelist are able to acceess server resources. This is mainly to allow only the React front-end servers.