The application uses FastAPI as the backend framework and PostgreSQL as the database which essentially serves as the file uploads metastore. This is used to keep track of other aspects of the portal such as approval requests, deletion requests, and API ingestion configurations. Other notable software used in the backend stack are:
- SQLAlchemy to interact with the database
- Alembic to handle database migrations
- Pydantic for data modeling and validation
The service used to generate and render emails is decoupled from the main backend service. For this, a lightweight Hono server is used, which in turn, makes calls to React Email to render the emails as both HTML and plaintext.
A Trino connector also backed by SQLAlchemy is used to query the Trino service. This is primarily used for retrieving the current version of the school geolocation and coverage schemas.
Redis is used as both a cache and a task queue/broker for Celery. The main cached items are the schemas, which is used heavily for the column mapping feature in the frontend. Celery runs a periodic tasks to refresh the cache.
This project uses TanStack Router's file-based routing for our routing needs.
This project uses Zustand
for managing global state. We use a single store located in the src/context/store.ts
file and split into multiple smaller stores using
Zustand's slices pattern.
Carbon Design System is the preferred library of choice since it is what Giga's Brand and UI design guide is based on. As a developer, you will be referencing Carbon's official React Storybook page often when trying to pick out components to use for future features.
For styling, we use TailwindCSS. If you need to override
styles of some elements of the Carbon Library, you can use the classic CSS approach of
adding/looking for the classnames held by these components and modifying their styles
directly via the carbon.scss file.
Both backend and frontend routes are protected by Azure AD B2C authentication. Role-based access control (RBAC) is handled in-app. Generally, Admin users have full authorization on all actions, while Regular users can only perform basic tasks like uploads for specific country-dataset combinations.