Dinder Is Served 🍽️

The backend for Dinder 🫃

RESTful API Server

Screenshots • How It's Made • Usage • Optimizations • Summary • Author

🚀 Live project: Dinder Is Served

Screenshots

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🧑‍🔬 How It's Made

Designed and built from scratch using the Node.js runtime & Express.js for handling routes and creating Dinder's API endpoints. Users are able to create accounts and log in, update profile information and create location-based feasts containing restaurants tailored to their occasion. Real-time establishment data is sourced from Google Maps and are stored alongside user votes in a PostgreSQL database. I also created authentication middleware to protect the API using JWTs, and authorization middleware to prevent voter fraud. The web service and hosted DB are both deployed on Render.

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Database Schema:

🏗️ Usage

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/thinktapper/DinderIsServed.git

2. Install the necessary packages

   Go to the main directory and install the necessary packages

   cd DinderIsServed/
   npm i

3. Add credentials

   A .env file will need to be added to the project root with the following variables:

   DATABASE_URL="postgresql://<username>:<password>@localhost:5432/<database>?schema=public"
   SECRET="<your-jwt-secret>"
   GOOGLE_API="<your-google-maps-api-key>"

4. Create the database

    npx prisma migrate dev --name init

5. Run the server

    npm run dev

   The server will be running on localhost:3000
   

🏋️‍♂️ Optimizations

With time, I plan to add the following features:

• Implement rate limiting to prevent brute force attacks
• Resolve security vulnerabilities in dependencies
• Add feature for users to create groups of friends/family members called Herds
• Create sharable links for inviting other users (registered or not) to join Herds
• Add a feature so users can add restaurants to their favorites
• Add a feature so users can filter restaurants by various criteria
  • Add options for that criteria in the feast creation form & persist in the database
• Add more detailed documentation for the API endpoints.

See the open issues for a full list of proposed features (and known issues).

📝 Summary

This project was a great way to learn more about the backend and how to create a Node + Express REST API server in TypeScript. I learned a lot about authentication & authorization by rolling my own auth middleware, and about how to deploy a secure API.

Key takeaways:

• Strengthened skills needed to plan, scope, research, and deploy an API.
• Learned how to use JWTs to authenticate users and protect routes.
• Practiced creating middleware to protect voting integrity amongst users.
• Practiced using Prisma to generate relational database models and interact with the DB.
• Learned how to create a seed script to populate the database with mock data.
• Learned how to use the Google Maps API to fetch real-time restaurant data.
• Learned how to set up continuous deployment with CI.
• Gained experience debugging and troubleshooting TypeScript and ESLint build errors and deployment issues.

👨‍💻 Author

Andrew Tapper - @thinktapper - andrew@tapper.codes

Frontend | Client app: https://github.com/thinktapper/DinderRN

Parent Project: https://github.com/thinktapper/dinder

License

Distributed under the GNU GPLv3. See LICENSE for more information.