Group 29 - project for CS261
Firstly, you need to have MongoDB running any version between 2.6 and 4.2 inclusive (check the compatibility listings below if you are unsure), running locally on port 27017, with access control disabled. The address of database host can be modified in the src/main/resources/server.properties file. Simply change the databaseHost variable to whatever address your database is hosted at - by default this is localhost:27017.
The project uses the MongoDB Java Driver version 3.12; compatibility listings are here: https://docs.mongodb.com/drivers/java/#compatibility
Java version 11 is required, as well as Maven to build and run the project.
To build the client side of the application, you will also need npm/node installed.
You will first need around 750MB of storage available for the whole project, excluding the storage used for the database.
To build the application, run the build_all.sh script. When running the first time, it will take some time to download all npm and Maven packages; please be patient.
To start the project, you can use the run_server.sh script. This will start the server running on port 4567. Therefore, if you go to http://localhost:4567 in your browser, you will be able to access the site.
The port the server runs on can be changed in the src/main/resources/server.properties file. Recompilation should not be required after making a change to this.
The client is a React application which interacts with the server via fetch requests to the API. App.jsx is the main file which gets loaded upon startup. We then use react-router to determine what component to show depending on what the URL of the current page is.
Whilst testing/editing the files, it is often useful to be able to, in real time, edit the files, and see immediate results. To achieve this behaviour, first change the REACT_APP_HTTP_ADDRESS and REACT_APP_WS_ADDRESS variables in client/.env.development to use the correct port on which you are running the server. By default, these are set to the server's default port, 4567.
Once this has been done, cd client, and run npm start to start a development server. This will automatically open a development server where the page will be automatically reloaded when a change is made. Please note that this will not automatically redirect you to the /login page if you are not authenticated.
When you want to update the server to use the new client changes, you need to first build the client (use the build_client.sh script), then you need to compile the server to use the new changes (build_server.sh). These can both be done automatically via the build_all.sh script.
The server is a Java application using the Spark framework.
If you only modify the server, the only script you need to run is build_server.sh. This will only recompile the server, and not the client.