Chatty App Backend

Chatty App backend server is an interesting real-time social network application. It is developed using node.js, typescript, redis and mongodb.

You can find the repo for the frontend built with react here.

Features

Signup and signin authentication
Forgot password and reset password
Change password when logged in
Create, read, update and delete posts
Post reactions
Comments
Followers, following, block and unblock
Private chat messaging with text, images, gifs, and reactions
Image upload
In-app notification and email notification

Main tools

Node.js
Typescript
MongoDB
Mongoose
Redis
Express
Bull
PM2
AWS
Terraform
Nodemailer
Sendgrid mail
Cloudinary
Jest
Lodash
Socket.io

Requirements

Node 16.x or higher
Redis (https://redis.io/download/)
MongoDB (https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/administration/install-community/)
Typescript
API key, secret and cloud name from cloudinary https://cloudinary.com/
Local email sender and password https://ethereal.email/

You'll need to copy the contents of .env.development.example, add to .env file and update with the necessary information.

Local Installation

There are three different branches develop, staging and main. The develop branch is the default branch.

git clone -b develop https://github.com/uzochukwueddie/chatty-backend.git
cd chatty-backend
npm install

To start the server after installation, run

npm run dev

Inside the setupServer.ts file, comment the line sameSite: 'none'.
You'll need to uncomment that line again before you deploy to AWS.

Make sure mongodb and redis are both running on your local machine.

Unit tests

You can run the command npm run test to execute the unit tests added to the features controllers.

API Endpoints

The actual endpoints for the application can be found inside the folder named endpoints https://github.com/uzochukwueddie/chatty-backend/tree/develop/endpoints.
The endpoint files all have a .http extension.
To use this files to make api calls, install the extension called rest client on vscode.
Update the endpoints http files before using.
The files inside the endpoints folder contains APIs for
- Authentication
- Chat
- Comments
- Followers, following, block and unblock
- Health
- Images
- Notification
- Posts
- Reactions
- User

View Data

You can view the contents of your redis cache by using a tool called redis-commander.
Download mongodb compass to view data. https://www.mongodb.com/try/download/compass.

AWS Setup

You can create an account on AWS if you don't have one already.
Download and install aws cli.
On AWS, create an IAM user. You'll get a key and secret.
Use aws configure command to add your iam secret and key to your local machine.
To deploy the backend server on AWS, it is required you have a domain to use.
With that domain, manually create a route53 hosted zone on AWS.
Copy the hosted zone NS properties and add to the nameservers section of your domain on the dashboard of your domain name provider. e.g: godaddy, namecheap etc.
For example, on namecheap.com

AWS Resources Used

VPC
Subnets
Internet gateways
Route tables
Elastic ips
Nat gateways
Security groups
ALB target groups
Route53
AWS Certificate Manager
Application load balancers
IAM roles
Elasticache
EC2 launch config
EC2 instances
Autoscaling group
S3
Code deploy
Cloudwatch

AWS Infrastructure Setup with Terraform

Make sure to uncomment this line sameSite: 'none' inside setupServer.ts file.
Install terraform
Terraform stores state about your managed infrastructure and configuration. This state is used by Terraform to map real world resources to your configuration, keep track of metadata, and to improve performance for large infrastructures.
This state is stored by default in a local file named "terraform.tfstate", but it can also be stored remotely, which works better in a team environment.
Update the variables.tf file with the correct data. Update the properties with comments.
To store your terraform remote state on AWS, first create a unique S3 bucket with a sub-folder name called develop.
Add that S3 bucket name to main.tf file. Also add your region to the file.
Create a keyPair on AWS. Keep the key safe on your local machine and add the name of the keyPair to ec2_launch_config.tf and bastion_hosts.tf files.
Before running the terraform apply command to your resources, you need to
- create a new s3 bucket to store env files
- inside the created s3 bucket, add a sub-folder called backend and inside the backend folder another sub-folder called develop. Bucket path should be something like <your-s3-bucket>/backend/develop
- in your project, create a .env.develop file. Add the contents of .env to the new file.
- the contents of .env.develop needs to be properties that will be used when deployed
  - DATABASE_URL should be an actual mongodb url. You can create an account on mongodb atlas and create a new database.
  - NODE_ENV can be set to production
  - CLIENT_URL can be set to the frontend application local url or actual domain
  - API_URL should be https://api.dev.<your-backend-domain> that you specified inside your terraform variables.tf file.
  - SENDGRID_API_KEY and SENDGRID_SENDER should be created from sendgrid dashboard. Create an account.
- after updating the .env.develop file, you can zip it and upload it to the new s3 bucket you created to store env files. Upload using aws cli
  - zip env-file.zip .env.develop. The file must be called env-file.zip.
  - aws --region <your-region> s3 cp env-file.zip s3://<your-s3-bucket>/backend/develop/
Go into the user-data.sh and update-env-file.sh files and update.
Once the env-file.zip has been added to your s3 bucket, you can execute inside the deployment folder, the commands:
- terraform init
- terraform validate
- terraform fmt
- terraform plan
- terraform apply -auto-approve
It will take sometime to create the resources. If everything works well, you should be able to access the backend dev api endpoints.
To destroy all created resources, run
- terraform destroy

Setup CI/CD Pipeline with CircleCI

Create an account on circleci.
Signup or login with the github or bitbucket account where you stored your code.
Setup your project.
Add the environment variables you see on the screenshot to circleci.
For CODECOV_TOKEN, visit CodeCov and signup or login with the same account where you have your project stored.
- Once you login and setup your project, you will receive a token. Add that token to circleci.
For CODE_DEPLOY_UPDATE, the default value is false. That is the first time you are setting up your pipeline and infrastructure. Once everything is setup and running, if you need to update your backend code, then you can change the property to true.
SLACK_ACCESS_TOKEN and SLACK_DEFAULT_CHANNEL can be obtained by following this documentation.

Before Starting a Build

Inside the circleci.yml file, you need to make some updates.
There are some properties named <variable-prefix> that you need to replace with the prefix value from your terraform variables.tf. Search the config.yml file and replace <variable-prefix>.

sajalkhan/chatty-backend