Project Details

This is a Student Acquisition System consisting of 5 phases:

• Application
• Assessment
• Orientation
• Interview
• Onboarding

Tech Stack

• NodeJS (version 14) | ExpressJS | ReactJS (v17) | EJS | TailwindCSS | MySQL v8.0.30 | Sequelize ORM | AWS EC2 | AWS SES | Redis v5.0.7 | Bull
  
• For unit testing it uses Jest & Chai.
  
• For E2E testing it uses Playwright v1.3.
• For emails it uses AWS SES, and for email queues it uses Redis-Bull.
• GitHub Actions workflows for CI/CD are also set up.

Environment Variables Required

• DEBUG | set to false to disable certain console logs used for debugging. This feature is not fully implemented.
• NODE_ENV | production, development, or test/testing
• SITE_DOMAIN_NAME | the url of the website, like https://www.website.com
• SESSION_SERET
• MYSQL_CONNECTION_STRING | format: mysql://username:password@localhost:3306/
• PORT | e.g. 3000
• TIMEZIME_OFFSET | offset of the server from Pakistan Standard Time, e.g. +05:00
• AWS_SES_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_SES_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_SES_REGION
• QUIZ_DEADLINE_FROM_SIGNUP_IN_DAYS | e.g. 30 (i.e. 30 days after a student is assigned a quiz, the deadline ends and student cannot solve the quiz anymore)

Database Initialization

MySQL

The application was developed on MySQL v8.0.30. All models are defined in /models using sequelize. Create an empty database in MySQL and mention its name in the config folder. By default the program expects the database to be named quizdb. In db/initialize.js, set alterandforce = true to initialize the empty database with some sample data upon server start. Set alterandforce = false afterwards to retain data on subsequent restarts.

Redis

You need to install redis v5.0.7 and run it on port 6379 before running the server as well.

Modules

To install required dependencies, run npm install in the project root. Make sure you have Node v14 LTS running. Higher node versions may cause problems.

Customizations

You may want to change the fontawesome import link because it is a free link associated with my personal fontawesome account and is only allowed to be used on one website.

EC2 Instance Hardware Requirements

MySQL requires 0.5Gb of RAM. If you try to use VS Code SSH-Remote on the server, you will need ~2Gb of RAM to be safe as it is known to crash <=1Gb instances. So for smooth operation, the system must have 1-2Gb of RAM. With my testing, a t3.small instance on AWS EC2 works fine, though it does crash on using VS Code Remote sometimes. I have also run the system on SQLite by changing the dialect of sequelize, and it works fine. This enabled me to run the system on a Raspberry PI 3 Model B on 1Gb of RAM.

Building

To optimize for production, you need to run npm run build:babel and npm run build:css. The built files are committed to the repository for simplicity of the deployment step.

Running

To finally start the server, run npm run dev for development or npm start for production.

Running E2E Tests

To run playwright tests in headless mode, you can use WSL2 as well. Run the following command in the root directory of the project:

npx playwright test

If you are running this command for the first time, it will tell you to install playwright and its dependencies first and will tell you which commands to run. Once you have run them, the npx playwright test command will work.