This is CatBytes Web Platform backend repo.

API documentation (Swagger)

Located in the /docs directory. *.json file is used for rendering, *.yaml is the original specification used in swagger UI.

Also published on GitHub pages: https://catbytes-community.github.io/webplatform-backend/

Documentation for developers

Located in the /docs/how-tos directory. All important information on local run, deployments, etc is stored there.

How to run project locally

⚠️ For simple local run (no breaking changes) you can connect to the remote (DEV) database.

To do that, you have to authenticate with AWS CLI first (ref. /docs/how-tos/local_run_and_configs.md)

🚨 For proper development it is strongly recommended to use local database. Here's how to do that:

1. Follow /docs/how-tos/setup_local_postgresql, step "Setting up Local PostgreSQL instance"
2. Use .env.local file for environment variables (default .env is picked up by Docker so to avoid confusion we use explicit local file for local development). Update your .env.local accordingly. Here is sample structure or reach out for up-to-date .env to fellow devs:

   DB_USER=marina_kim
   DB_HOST=localhost
   DB_NAME=mydatabase
   DB_PASS=password
   DB_PORT=5432
   ENVIRONMENT=local # the IMPORTANT part!!! this tells the service to use local resources.

✅ Once you are authenticated with AWS CLI or you have the local PostgreSQL setup, you can successfully run

npm start

or

nodemon server.js

to start the server.

Useful commands: Makefile

Refer to the Makefile to see commands frequently used in development. Example usage:

make connect-dev

This will execute the connect-dev command and connect you to the dev EC2 instance. Make sure you have all required environment variables set.

Run

make help

to list all available Makefile commands.