Pbl Backend

Backend of the Pick-by-Light-System

Introduction

Pick By Light – What’s that?

Ever searched for items in a shelf? Tools or parts in a workshop organizer?

Pick By Light is a concept for helping people find things. The position of the currently desired object will be shown through visual signals. This concept is used by logistic centers like storage buildings, but can also be used on a smaller scale.

This pick-by-light-project (alias pbl-project) is intended to enable people to build their own pick-by-light system – big or small and easily adaptable.

It was developed as a students project in the course “SWT-Projekt” at Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM).

Documentation can be found in Project Wiki

Technologies

• NodeJS → The backend server is a NodeJS server.
• MongoDB → The database in which the application's data is organized is a MongoDB database.
• Mongoose → The schema-based technology Mongoose is used in order to provide an easy way to handle data within the database.
• Chai → Automatic testing is realized through the testing framework Chai.
• LDAP → Supports authorization via LDAP-Server (but authorization via backend without LDAP is also possible).

Project setup

cd pbl-backend
npm install

Compiles and reloads automatically when files change

npm run dev

Runs project in production mode

npm run start

Compiles only

npm run build

Start mongo and node server

NODE_ENV=docker_dev docker-compose up --build --detach

Stop mongo and node server

docker-compose down

Configuration

Config variables

Defined in config

• debug → if set true debugging logs will be printed

Defined in default, docker_dev, docker_prod and test

• disableAuth → if set true any authorization functionality will be turned off - used for testing and development only!
• disableLDAP → if set true only local authentication is used!

Config constants

Defined in constants

• jwtkey → JWT stands for json web token and is a standardized acces token, which secures data between two parties. → An implementation of JWT can be found at https://jwt.io/. → The jwt key defined in config constants is used to sign and verify the payload in the files (see auth.controller.ts and auth.module.ts)

• expirationTime → time until jwtkey expires

• requiredLangs → languages that are required ("en" as English, "de" as German)

Tests

Make sure your testing database is empty. Execute tests defined in tests

NODE_ENV=test npm run test

Add test data to Mongo Database

In case you might want to use test data add test data from json-Files tests into mongo database

npm run addData

Remove all data from Mongo Database

npm run removeData

Problems

For some pcs the docker startup needs some extra commands. Try

systemctl start docker

before doing anything else and add sudo when starting the mongo server

sudo NODE_ENV=docker_dev docker-compose up --build --detach