Class 45 final project: Q&A Sessions

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This is the final project for the HackYourFuture curriculum we did as a class using the MERN stack by following the agile methodology with our team and a group of mentors. A quick guide to what we built:

Q&A sessions

Our project is titled Q&A sessions. As students at HackYourFuture, our weekly Q&A sessions are vital. These sessions are the heartbeat of our learning process, where we seek advice, clarity and practical solutions from the guidance of our mentors. Currently, these interactions take place within our class channel in Slack.

However, how amazing would it be if we had a dedicated space to archive and share all these valuable exchanges? A repository where every question, every answer, every troubleshooting tip could be stored and accessed not only by us, but by students worldwide. We believe these educational conversations are a treasure of knowledge, and that’s where our project comes in, a platform where HYF students can share questions, answers, and insights.

1. Setup

First, to setup all the directories run the following in the main directory:

npm install

npm run setup

The first command will install cypress and some small libraries needed for running the rest of the commands. The second will go into the client and server directories and set those up to be ran.

In the client and server directory there are two .env.example files. Create a copy and rename that to .env. Then follow the instructions in those files to fill in the right values.

To run the app in dev mode you can run the following command in the main directory:

npm run dev

2. Code structure

client
├── public
└── src
|   └── __tests__
|   └── __testUtils__
|   └── components
|   └── hooks
|   └── pages
|       └── __tests__
|       └── components
|   └── util
|   index.jsx
cypress
|   └── fixtures
|   └── integration
|   └── plugins
|   └── support
server
└── src
    └── __tests__
    └── __testUtils__
    └── controllers
    └── db
    └── models
    └── routes
    └── util
    index.js

2.1 Client structure

• public || public facing client code
• __tests__ || any jest tests for specific components will be in a __tests__ folder on the same level
• __testUtils__ || any code that is only being used in the tests is put in the __testUtils__ folder to separate that away from the rest of the code
• components || all of our shared components that are used over multiple pages
• hooks || all of our custom hooks
• pages || the page components of our app, any routing will go between these components
• pages/components || components used specifically on those pages
• util || any utility functions that can be used anywhere on the client side
• index.jsx || the start point of the client

2.2 Cypress structure

• fixtures || any data/files that cypress needs can be placed here
• integration || all of our tests are in here, separated in folders based on the pages in our app
• plugins || any plugins for our cypress configuration can be placed here
• support || custom commands and other support files for cypress can be placed here

2.3 Server structure

• __tests__ || any jest tests for the api endpoints as that is our testing strategy for the backend
• __testUtils__ || any code that is only being used in the tests is put in the __testUtils__ folder to separate that away from the rest of the code
• controllers || all of our controller functions that interact with the database
• db || all of our configuration for the database
• models || all of our mongoose models will be placed here
• routes || code to match up the API with our controllers
• util || any utility functions that can be used anywhere on the server side
• index.js || the start point of the server

3. Stack / external libraries

The base stack of the app is a MERN stack (Mongoose, Express, React, Node). Next to that we make use of the following extras:

3.1 Configuration libraries

• dotenv || To load the .env variables into the process environment. See docs
• webpack / html-webpack-plugin || To bundle our React app and create a static app to host. See docs
• husky || To run our tests and linter before committing. See docs
• eslint || To check our code. We have different configurations for frontend and backend. You can check out the configuration in the .eslintrc.(c)js files in the respective client and server folders. See docs
• prettier || To automatically format our code. See docs
• concurrently || To run commands in parallel. See docs

For more information on how these work together including the automatic deployment to heroku, have a look at our detailed DEV file.

3.2 Client-side libraries

• @testing-library/* || We use React Testing Library to write all of our tests. See docs
• jest || To run our tests and coverage. See docs
• jest-fetch-mock || To mock out the backend for our testing purposes. See docs
• prop-types || To type-check our components. See docs

3.3 Server-side libraries

• nodemon || To automatically restart the server when in development mode. See docs
• jest || To run our tests and coverage. See docs
• supertest || To more easily test our endpoints. See docs
• mongodb-memory-server || To mock out our database in our backend tests. See docs
• cors || To open up our API. See docs
• mongoose || To add schemas to our database. See docs