Running Locally

To run frontend locally use the command:

npm run dev

To run the backend locally use the command:

sam local start-api

and run DynamoDB locally with:

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 amazon/dynamodb-local

making sure to set DYNAMODB_ENDPOINT to http://localhost:8000 in your .env file

the API will be available locally at http://127.0.0.1:3000

eg GET http://127.0.0.1:3000/tasks

Invoke Local Lambda Locally

To invoke a function locally, you can use the following command - make sure to use the function name as specified in backend/template.yaml:

sam local invoke GetTaskFunction --event testGetEvent.json

Deploying the Frontend

To deploy the frontend to AWS S3, run jest to ensure all tests are passing

Then run the following command to build the code first:

npm run build

followed by

aws s3 sync dist/ s3://task-manager-pro-9000

Deploying the Backend

To manually deploy the backend, ensure you have AWS SAM CLI installed

Run cd backend and npx tsc (or you can npm i -g typescript and run tsc) to build your dist folder first.

Then run cd src and npm run postbuild to copy node_modules into the dist folder

Authenticate either with CLI + Access Key ID & Secret Access Key, using AWS Cloudshell for direct in browser CLI, or you can use the V2 CLI and auth through a User / SSO

The user that you are authenticating with should have the IAM policy outlined in deployment/sam-deploy-policy.json

Once you are authenticated in your CLI, you can then run the following from the backend folder:

sam build sam deploy

Use --guided flag on sam deploy if this is the first time deployment

Use --no-confirm-changeset flag if

Troubleshooting

• Make sure you've installed the aws-cli and aws-sam-cli

• Ensure to build your backend files with tsc command and confirm that the expected function files are in the dist folder

• Use node -v to ensure you are using a modern nodeJS version, this app was built using node v20 but 20 or above should be fine

• If running DynamoDB locally, make sure to use the UI to populate the data

Future Improvements

• Add authentication via AWS Cognito
• Modify tasks to be bound to individual users so they only see their tasks and only when authenticated via frontend login
• Use Cognito Authorizer to allow auth based on Cognito User Pools for API Gateway
• Improve styling + UX in the frontend app
• Testing for backend functions, time consuming due to complexity of mock objects for API gateway events
• Bucket hosting on HTTP not very secure so ideally would move to Cloudfront and use SSL cert for secure HTTPS hosting
• API validation is light, and with more time it would be ideal to go more in depth with a focus on security
• Given the time constraints the site was developed for desktop only, with more time I would implement mobile first responsive styling

Github Actions Deployment

Ideally if there was more time, deployment would not be manually done and instead the Github Actions setup to trigger on push would be setup

This way we can use TBD and trigger deployment on pushes, ideally with manual production approval gates

These could then also run our linter, tests etc.