backend

Personal Website Backend

It's not really a backend, just a handful of Express endpoints on Firebase Functions. That being said, here's all you need to know to get started.

Deploying

To deploy functions, you first need to install Firebase's CLI. It can be done like so:

# You may need to run this with sudo
npm install -g firebase-tools

Next, you'll need to login to your account by running:

# This will open a browser window.
firebase login

Finally, to deploy, just:

firebase deploy

Partial functions

You can deploy or update a subset of functions very easily by doing the following:

firebase deploy --only functions:myFunctionName

Function Descriptions

Here's what they do

devmail

A quick-and-easy endpoint to hit that returns a 200 status code and friendly success message. To be used when testing a development build. The frontend is already equipped to hit a devmail endpoint, so specify your own if you deploy this function.

mail

Here's the bread and butter of sending contact information via email. In order for this to work, you must do the following:

Configure the email transport using the default SMTP transport and a gmail account. For Gmail, enable these:

1. https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps
2. https://accounts.google.com/DisplayUnlockCaptcha. For other types of transports such as Sendgrid see https://nodemailer.com/transports/

Set the following environment data by running the following:

firebase functions:config:set gmail.email="EMAIL USERNAME" gmail.password="EMAIL PASSWORD" contact.receiver="YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS@DOMAIN.COM"

You can customize the handlebars template or even add your own data. All up to you!

template

An easy GET endpoint to hit to test out what your emailed form looks like with mock data.