Create Social Network

Create Social Network is a educational project. The main idea is to demonstrate how one can build a large scalable project with Javascript. However you get the core functionality of social network by running one command and then you can build more on top of that.

Repository is divided into three main packages:

api This package contains API for Social Networking App, built with Nodejs, Express, GraphQL, Apollo Server and MongoDB with Mongoose.
frontend Is a frontend for Social Networking App, built with React, GraphQL, Apollo Client and Styled Components.
lib Is a Nodejs command line script, that helps users to install the Social Networking App with one command. This package is published to NPM as a create-social-network

Features

Messenger Real time messaging system.
Notifications Get instant notification when someone follows/messages you or likes/comments on your post.
User Status Check if user is Online or not in real time.
News Feed Fresh posts from people you are following.
Explore New Posts and People.
Follow a particular user and get notified for their activity.
Personalize Profile With profile/cover photo and personal posts.
Authentication & Authorization with Password reset functionality.

Demo

https://worldexplorer.netlify.com/

Screenshots of the app

Home	Messages	Profile

People	Explore	Notifications

Quick Installation

npx create-social-network my-network
cd my-network
npm start

(npx comes with npm 5.2+ and higher, see instructions for older npm versions)

After installation open http://localhost:3000/ to see your app.

Requirements and Configuration

You’ll need to have Node 8.16.0 or Node 10.16.0 or later version on your local development machine

By default, the app uses MongoDB hosted on mLab and Cloudinary CDN for hosting images. We have created a demo user for mLab and Cloudinary so you can run the app locally without adding Mongo URL and Cloudinary API Key, however when you start developing your application it is recommended to replace that information with your own, so that everyone has their own Database and CDN.

Note demo database is being deleted and populated with demo data daily

Replacing Mongo URL

Replace MONGO_URL value in api/.env file with your mLab database url or with local one.

Replacing Cloudinary API Key

Grab Cloud name API Key and API Secret from Cloudinary dashboard and replace corresponding values inside api/.env file.

Mail Provider

For password reset functionality you will need to replace Email Provider values also in api/.env file.

Creating an App

To create a new app, you may choose one of the following methods:

npx

npx create-social-network my-network

(npx comes with npm 5.2+ and higher, see instructions for older npm versions)

npm

npm init social-network my-network

npm init <initializer> is available in npm 6+

Yarn

yarn create social-network my-network

yarn create is available in Yarn 0.25+

It will create a directory called my-network inside the current folder. Inside that directory, it will generate the initial project structure and install dependencies.

my-network
├── api
├── frontend
├── node_modules
├── .gitignore
├── netlify.toml
├── package.json
├── README.md

The app is organized as Monorepo using Yarn Workspaces

Once the installation is done, you can open your project folder:

cd my-network

And start the application with npm start or yarn start that will run the app in development mode. Open http://localhost:3000/ to view it in the browser.

The page will automatically reload if you make changes to the code.

Deployment

In development mode we are starting api and frontend servers with one command, but we need to deploy them separately.

API Deployment

Frontend Deployment

Contributing

Please read our CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting a Pull Request to the project.

rog3r/create-social-network