helps-backend

Setting up the application

Requirements:

• nodejs (See https://nodejs.org/en/download/)
• npm (This comes with nodejs download)
• yarn (See https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/#mac-stable)
• Docker, See:
  • Mac: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/install/
  • Windows: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/

Running the application

1. From the command line, cd into the application directory
2. Run: yarn install
3. Run: yarn run start (Expect the application to startup)
4. To validate the application is running, from the browser, navigate to: 'http://localhost:3001/api/v1/test' and expect to see 'Hello world'.

Running the application with PM2

PM2 can be used to run the application in a cluster which will also be able to handle failures and exceptions thrown by the application. Note: This should be used for the presentation so we don't have to restart the server every time an error occurs.

1. To run the application with pm2, run: yarn startPm2 (Will do a tsc and start up pm2 using the config from 'pm2.yml')
2. To view the cluster you can run: yarn pm2 list
3. To view application logs run: yarn pm2 logs
4. To stop the cluster, you can run yarn stopPm2

Running Mongo with Docker

Once you have Docker installed and running, open up your terminal and navigate to the root of this application. From the command line, run:

1. docker-compose up (Expect to see startup logs for Mongodb and Mongo Admin. You should now be able to access the database via this application, can verify through yarn start. Optional: Add -d after up to run in the background.)
2. Navigate to 'http://localhost:1234/app/connection_list' (Expect to see adminMongo dashboard appear.)
3. Fill out the connection parameters as follows:
   • Connection name: 'local'
   • Connection string: 'mongodb://mongodb:27017/mytestdatabase'
4. Click 'Add connection' You should now be able to click 'Connect' and see 'mytestdatabase' appear on the left panel. Here you will be able to view the collections and view documents saved in Mongo.

Once you have verified the database is displaying, you can then seed the database (prefill with random values) if you would like to view random session etc in the database. To do so, run yarn seed from the command line and expect it to output 'Done' after a few seconds.

Additional Information:

To stop the database running, use 'ctrl c' to exit, then run docker-compose stop to stop the containers running. You can verify they have stopped by running docker container ls expecting nothing to appear. If you see the containers relevant to this application running, run docker container stop <CONTAINER ID>.

Using email

Current email is setup using nodemailer with a temporary gmail account. These details are saved in a .env file (see .env_template for what fields are needed in this .env file). To get credentials, please ask someone in the group. NOTE: Make sure these credentials are not saved in any other file and accidentally committed.

If you have any issues, please ask someone in the group :) This application was setup with the help of the following resources:

• production ready nodejs
• strongly typed models with mongoose and typescript
• Seeding mongodb the right way