Introduction

This repository contains the backend for the app EasyTeach, which has now reached its end-of-life (EOL). I am open-sourcing it now. The app was used by over 500 users, including 25+ paid users, and included the following features:

• Real Time Chat
• User Management
• Report Generation
• Quiz creation
• End-to-end tracking
• File upload using modules

and much more....

Overview

This project contains two main folders:- src, tests.

• src

  • db - initiating the ORM instance
  • middlewares - used in between api routes to check auth status, check user levels etc.
  • migrations - contains database migrations
  • models - contains the database table structures (orm models)
  • services - contains code for emailing, file management and push notification
  • typings - contains custom type for the req object in express. mostly variables as passed through the middlewares
  • utils - utility functions and constants
  • routers - contains API routes and logic

• tests

  • fixtures - contains code to seed the database with initial data
  • all other files - contains unit tests for their respective modules.

Tools used in the project:

• firebase (for push notification and analytics)
• postgres (primary database)
• ffmpeg (for video processing)
• socket.io (for managing websockets)

Running the project

There's couple of things that needs to get setup to run this project. This guide will take you through it.

Prerequisite

In the root of the project, first run

npm install

Then one level outside of the root, run following commands

mkdir -p media/{users/{avatar,images},class/{docs,images,videos}}
mkdir keys
cd keys
openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048 -out private.pem
openssl rsa -in private.pem -pubout -out public.pem

Finally, download your Firebase config file from the console and paste it one level outside the root directory. Then, change the filename (for the serviceAccount variable) in src/index.ts.

Setting env vars

First, make a folder and make some env files to make app function properly

mkdir config
touch dev.env # env variables for the development env
touch test.env # env variables for the test environment
# I would suggest to directly inject env variables using pm2 on an production environment

Below are the variables that needs to be defined when running the app

cookieSecret=secret to sign a cookie

NODE_ENV=depending upon the environment (dev|production|test)

DBurl=url to connect to postgres

key_id=obtained from razorpay (to prcoess payments)

key_secret=obtained from razorpay (to process payments)

emailHost=the host of your email service

emailPort=the port of email service

emailUser=user id of the email

emailPass=password of user provided

salt1=a salt used for hashing password

salt2= salt for hashing password

accPass=random password used in login API

And you're done 🎉. Now you can finally run the project.

Getting app running

Now, to run the project, execute the following command from root directory:

npm start

Note: The app might crash when you run the above command for the first time. Don't panic; just run the command once again. This is because the build folder wouldn't exist on the first run as TypeScript needs to be compiled.

Misc

I've been also thinking on open sourcing the app and website. Feel free to open issue if you have any questions or need any help.