Voluntinder

Voluntinder is a platform which tries to pair altruistic, good natured people with some extra time to kill, and volunteering oportunities nearby.

Getting Started

Take a look at the project structure.
- Notice that the client and the server have their own folders.
- They also have their own package.json files and node_modules folders. These package.json files are used only for their scripts fields.
- The package.json in the root specifies all dependencies of the server and client.
Run yarn install
- yarn is a drop-in replacement for npm. Almost all of the commands are the same. Heroku supports both natively. If you are married to npm, simply remove the three yarn.lock files and run npm install. Be sure to add and commit the package-lock.json files.
- If you are not using yarn, install in with brew install yarn (for macOS).
Run yarn run dev.
- Looking at the scripts field in package.json, we can see this starts the sql server in the background, then executes a command called concurrently. This command is installed along with the other dependencies in yarn install. It allows you to run any number of other commands with a node process printing the output for each to the same terminal.
- Shortly after running, your browser should open with the website displaying.
- We used create-react-app to generate the boilerplate for the client, and react-scripts to develop and build. Read this guide for more about the setup.

react-scripts uses webpack hot reloading, so just edit and watch the terminal or browser for errors.
We used semantic-ui for css styling. It is included as a script tag in index.html. We did not use the component library semantic-ui-react, and instead just styled using className to set the css classes.
The client runs at localhost:3000, and proxies relative requests (that is, API requests which do not begin with a domain, like axios.get('/api/v3/users')) to the server, which is running at localhost:3001. You do not need to know anything about this for it to "Just Work". I just wanted to make sure you knew it was happening. You can read about what's going on in the blog post linked above. Linked here for convenience.

Server supports hot reloading via nodemon.
Express v4 with Sequalize for the ORM and mysql for the database.
Database files include calls to populate the database with dummy user and company data.