currency-converter: A PHP repository from Novica89

About the project

This is a very simple, but fully working currency conversion app made with Laravel and Vue.js

Backend uses external API service for fetching all currency pairs and conversion rates
Frontend has a currency-converter component that provides instant currency conversions for around 170 supported currency pairs.

Clone the repo
Make sure to do composer install and npm install to install front end libraries
Create a database and name it however you want
create an .env file inside the project root folder and copy over the contents of the .env.example to it, then update database information to match your own in the .env file.
Run php artisan key:generate to generate app key
Run php artisan migrate in the CLI to migrate DB tables
Change the apiUrl property of AppConfig object to the correct API url of your own backend inside of resources/js/bootstrap.js file. The code block looks like this
```
  window.AppConfig = {
      apiUrl: 'http://currency-converter.test/api/v1/'
  }
```
Compile all the assets with npm run dev.
You would need to run the Command that actually fetches current currencies and their exchange rates once before using the app (since the app requires them in order to function). To do this, the easiest way possible would be just to run php artisan currency:refresh-rates inside of the CLI. This command can be run in the same away, whenever you want to update currencies and their rates (it's been scheduled to run every 6 hours by default - read 'Project defaults' section for more info on this)
If you want a real time compilation as you work and make front end changes, run npm run watch

Project is made with a thought in mind that the best way to fetch currencies and conversion rates is to have a Command class that does this and the command is ran by a CRON job every X hours (you can change this in order to update conversion rates more often). By default, Command is ran every 6 hours.
There is only a need to setup one specific CRON job directly on the server where the app will live in it's final form in order to run all of the defined CRON commands by the app. In order to find out how to do this, make sure to read through this documentation page https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/scheduling#running-the-scheduler

Caching the currency and currency rates results fetching from the DB and clearing the cache key whenever the CRON command is ran successfully so that next time it actually fetches newest rates in the controller
Checking if input in the currency conversion is string and setting the value to 0 if it is for example.
On the Vue.js side, occasionally do a fetch of possible newest rates from the backend if in the meantime they have changed to make sure frontend remains up-to-date with newest rates even if page remains open for hours without refreshing.