Backend

Technologies Used

• Docker

Node

(for the exhaustive list of packages please refer to package.json)

• Express - Node.js framework
  • Express Session - handles cookie
• PostgreSQL - Database (SQL)
• Passport - Authentication
• Cors - Cross origin resource sharing
• bcrypt - password hashing
• cookie - populate req.cookies
• nodemailer - send email verification emails
• check-password-strength - check the strength of submitted password
• unique-names-generator - generate name for demo users
• generate-password - generate password for demo users
• nodemon (dev) - file watcher daemon
• concurrently (dev) - run frontend and backend concurrently

Source

Docker

Two containers are defined in docker-compose.yml: MIST-backend and MIST-db.

• MIST-backend is synced with src, and MIST-db is built with the postgres docker image. The two are connected with an internal docker bridge.
• Docker is instructed to ignore the node_modules folder, so on the host machine there is no node_modules folder.

Express

• server.js handles initialization (cors & session).
• route.js sets up the routes with API.
• The API files serves as a level of abstraction between HTTP requests and DB, although at this point the req object is requested by the DB methods. (A potential next step would be changing the parameter from 'req' to {'user', 'email', ...etc})

DB

• All the methods contain pure SQL queries without an ORM. Instead of structuring it like a class similar to ORM, we went with exporting all the functions one by one. The schemas of all the data can be found in the setup script inside scripts.

• Some of the files are named with numbers so when Docker initializes the DB the tables are initialized in the correct order.

• The configuration file to connect to the DB is dbconfig.js.