API Server for tclone

Try the app here

This project is my own take on building Twitter clone and I have tried to keep things simple and concise. With minimal modules needed, it is very lightweight and fast, yet very functional and feature-rich. Three parts of project viz, Front-end, Database and API server are separately hosted. This repo contains the source code for the server API providing REST API for interacting with database and authentication.

Things used

• Express for server.

• MongoDB for database and a full text search!

• Mongoose as Mongo driver and for model and schema validation.

• Passport with Local strategy for authentication.

• Bcryptjs for password hashing.

• Cookies/express-session/connect-mongo for session management and storage

File structure.

• app.js - main express app file.
• passport.js auth strategy and serialization.
• models/
  • contains Mongoose schema's and models for database collections.
• routes/
  • auth.js - contains authentication related routes, like /auth/login, /auth/logout, etc.
  • api.js - contains all other app routes.
• controllers/
  • contains functions to interact with database and return data to routes.
• serializers/
  • contains functions to serialize data returned from database to be sent to client.
• utils/
  • contains some utility functions.

Deploying

You will need to set some environment variable, below is the example .env file.

MONGO_URL=<link to atlas address or wherever your mongoDB is deployed, defaults to 'mongodb://localhost/test'>
SESSION_SECRET=<passed to session middleware, defaults to 'my shitty session secret'>

# Push notifications keys. You can generate them with command "./node_modules/.bin/web-push generate-vapid-keys"
PUBLIC_VAPID_KEY=<public vapid key which also goes into React front-end>
PRIVATE_VAPID_KEY=<corresponding private key>
# This must be either a URL or a 'mailto:' address.
# For example: 'https://my-site.com/contact' or 'mailto: contact@my-site.com'
WEB_PUSH_CONTACT="mailto: muzamilsofi@outlook.com"

• npm install to install dependencies.
• npm run dev to start development server with nodemon.
• npm start to start production server.