Acebook MERN

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.

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. Clone repo to local machine, then install dependencies for both the frontend and api applications:

   cd frontend
   npm install
   cd ../api
   npm install
   

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

3. 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.

4. 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

2. 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.

'uploads' directory:

you must create a folder called 'uploads' that sits directly under the 'api' directory. this is where users pictures will be served from, after they've been saved in the database. (this is related to the 'multer' middleware)