• Backend: Express Server, Knex.js

• Frontend: React.js Client, Axios, Bootstrap

First make sure to open a terminal window to ./backend and ./frontend and from there run yarn or npm install in both directories to install the necessary packages.

Create a file in the ./frontend folder called .env and add the the following to it (if it is not already there):

CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING=true

Create a file in the ./backend folder called .env and add the the following to it:

NOTE: It is not recommended you push this file to your GitHub repo as it may expose your secrets to the world!

# POPULATE WITH YOUR OWN VALUES SPECIFIED IN DATABASE CREATION!
# mysql database name
MYSQL_DB=
# mysql port (usually 3306)
MYSQL_PORT=
# mysql cloud database login user
MYSQL_CLOUD_USER=
# mysql cloud database login password
MYSQL_CLOUD_PASS=
# mysql cloud database host URL
MYSQL_CLOUD_HOST=
# jwt secret keys
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=
REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET=

To ensure the backend API can connect to the React client, update the CORS-allowed origins to include the frontend URL in the backend\config\allowedOrigins.js file and update the API endpoint in the frontend\src\api\axios.js file.

Once you have set up your MySQL database on a DBaaS provider like AWS RDS or GCloud CloudSQL, ensure that the database is publicly accessible on the port you used in setup (usually 3306).

In ./backend/.env add all the values that you were provided specifically the host, user, pass, and port of the database. For the JWT secret keys, you can open node in the terminal and create random strings using the following command: require('crypto').randomBytes(64).toString('hex').

Using a tool such as MySQL Workbech, connect to the MySQL database and create a database for the project using the command: create database db;. Return to the ./backend directory, and in the terminal, enter knex migrate:latest to create the database schema.

After installing the packages and entering your cloud DBaaS connection details, all you need to do is run docker-compose up from the root directory of the project to have the docker-compose file automatically spin the containers up for you.

If you want to run a terminal in detached mode (so you can close the window and it wont stop the containers) then type docker-compose up -d for a headless start instead.

As always make sure to type docker-compose down to shut the containers down and close everything up.

Click here to read the directions on how to deploy the project to the cloud on an EC2 instance for all to visit!