BaljeetVerse-Social-Plateform

Social network for developers

This is a MERN stack application from the "MERN Stack Front To Back". It is a small social network app that includes authentication, profiles and forum posts. Here is the link of website.

Preview 🏞️ 🌅

Quick Start 🚀

Add a default.json file in config folder with the following

{
  "mongoURI": "<your_mongoDB_Atlas_uri_with_credentials>",
  "jwtSecret": "secret",
  "githubToken": "<yoursecrectaccesstoken>"
}

Install server dependencies

npm install

Install client dependencies

cd client
npm install

Run both Express & React from root

npm run dev

Build for production

cd client
npm run build

Test production before deploy

After running a build in the client 👆, cd into the root of the project.
And run...

Linux/Unix

NODE_ENV=production node server.js

Windows Cmd Prompt or Powershell

$env:NODE_ENV="production"
node server.js

Check in browser on http://localhost:5000/

Deploy to Heroku

If you followed the sensible advice above and included config/default.json and config/production.json in your .gitignore file, then pushing to Heroku will omit your config files from the push.
However, Heroku needs these files for a successful build.
So how to get them to Heroku without commiting them to GitHub?

What I suggest you do is create a local only branch, lets call it production.

git checkout -b production

We can use this branch to deploy from, with our config files.

Add the config file...

git add -f config/production.json

This will track the file in git on this branch only. DON'T PUSH THE PRODUCTION BRANCH TO GITHUB

Commit...

git commit -m 'ready to deploy'

Create your Heroku project

heroku create

And push the local production branch to the remote heroku main branch.

git push heroku production:main

Now Heroku will have the config it needs to build the project.

Don't forget to make sure your production database is not whitelisted in MongoDB Atlas, otherwise the database connection will fail and your app will crash.

After deployment you can delete the production branch if you like.

git checkout main
git branch -D production

Or you can leave it to merge and push updates from another branch.
Make any changes you need on your main branch and merge those into your production branch.

git checkout production
git merge main

Once merged you can push to heroku as above and your site will rebuild and be updated.

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Fix broken links in gravatar 🔗

There is an unresolved issue with the node-gravatar package, whereby the url is not valid. Fortunately we added normalize-url so we can use that to easily fix the issue. If you're not seeing Gravatar avatars showing in your app then most likely you need to implement this change.

Redux subscription to manage local storage 📥

The rules of redux say that our reducers should be pure and do just one thing.

If you're not familiar with the concept of pure functions, they must do the following..

1. Return the same output given the same input.
2. Have no side effects.

So our reducers are not the best place to manage local storage of our auth token. Ideally our action creators should also just dispatch actions, nothing else. So using these for additional side effects like setting authentication headers is not the best solution here.

Redux provides us with a store.subscribe listener that runs every time a state change occurs.

We can use this listener to watch our store and set our auth token in local storage and axios headers accordingly.

• if there is a token - store it in local storage and set the headers.
• if there is no token - token is null - remove it from storage and delete the headers.

The subscription can be seen in client/src/store.js

We also need to change our client/src/utils/setAuthToken.js so it now handles both the setting of the token in local storage and in axios headers.

With those two changes in place we can remove all setting of local storage from client/src/reducers/auth.js. And remove setting of the token in axios headers from client/src/actions/auth.js. This helps keep our code predictable, manageable and ultimately bug free.

Log user out on token expiration 🔐

If the Json Web Token expires then it should log the user out and end the authentication of their session.

We can do this using a axios interceptor together paired with creating an instance of axios.
The interceptor, well... intercepts any response and checks the response from our api for a 401 status in the response.
ie. the token has now expired and is no longer valid, or no valid token was sent.
If such a status exists then we log out the user and clear the profile from redux state.

Note that implementing this change also requires that you use the updated code in utils/setAuthToken.js Which also in turn depends on utils/api.js I would also recommending updating to use a redux subscription to mange setting of the auth token in headers and local storage.

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App Info

Author

Baljeet Singh

Version

2.0.0

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License