3rd-Year-Project

This is my 3rd year project for college. It incorporates material and topics from all the modules I studied in college. There was no specification provided as it was up to the student to choose the project.

Introduction

After giving some consideration to the goals and the time frame for this project I decided to develop a messaging app. The goals for this messaging app were to be cross-platform, fast, user friendly, reliable and developed using best practices.

These goals influenced the technologies used. For example, in order to make it cross-platform I opted to use web technologies like Angular 2 for the frontend with a RESTful api built with python Flask. Redis was used for speed because it is an in-memory database.

Building a feature rich application was not one of the initial goals.

This project is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The project is live at http://35.163.94.108/.

For more information you can see the Wiki for this project.

A video demonstrating how to use the application is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FTCXMDS6hA.

Setup

This section of the documentation describes how to setup and run the application. First clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/KeithWilliamsGMIT/3rd-Year-Project.git
cd 3rd-Year-Project

Setting up the databases

This application using two databases. They are Redis and MongoDB. You must download and install both databases. To start the databases, open two seperate terminals and use the following commands.

# Start Redis
redis-server

# Start MongoDB
mongo

Setting up the back end

Navigate to the backend directory.

cd backend

Create and activate a virtual environment to manage all python dependencies using virtualenv.

virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate

Install all dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Start the flask backend.

cd app
python3 app.py

The API should now be available at http://0.0.0.0:5000.

Setting uo the front end

Navigate to the frontend directory.

cd frontend

You will need to install NodeJS in order to run the angular2 frontend. The easiest way to manage NodeJS installations is to use npm. Use the follwing commands to install the dependencies using npm.

# Install project dependencies
npm install

Now start the application.

npm start

The application should now be available at http://127.0.0.1:8080.