ProDev Nexus E-Commerce Backend

Live Demo URL: https://prodev-backend.onrender.com/

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🚀 Overview

ProDev Nexus is a production-grade, scalable API built for modern e-commerce platforms. It leverages Django 5 and Django REST Framework to provide a robust suite of features including secure authentication, product management, real-time notifications, and atomic order processing.

The system is designed with data integrity and concurrency in mind, utilizing atomic transactions, row-level locking, and asynchronous background processing via Celery & Redis. It is fully containerized and ready for cloud deployment.

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🎥 Video Demo

Watch the system in action: Async Order Processing & Architecture Walkthrough

Video Demo URL: prodev-backend-video-demo

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⚡ Key Features

• Authentication: Secure JWT-based auth (Access/Refresh tokens) with custom user models and role-based access control (Admin vs. Customer).
• Product Catalog: Advanced CRUD with image uploads (Cloudinary), soft-delete functionality, and filtering (price, category, stock).
• Asynchronous Processing: Heavy tasks (like email notifications) are offloaded to background workers using Celery & Redis, ensuring the API responds in <200ms.
• Order Processing: Atomic order creation with nested item support, price snapshotting, and automatic stock adjustment.
• Notifications: Dual-channel system (In-App + Email) powered by Celery.
• Infrastructure: Fully dockerized environment with Nginx/Gunicorn, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery Workers and RabbitMQ.
• CI/CD: Automated testing and deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions and Jenkins.
• Developer Hub: Includes a dedicated landing page and interactive Swagger documentation.

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🛠️ Technology Stack

Component	Technology	Role
Language	Python 3.11	Core logic
Framework	Django 5 + DRF	API framework
Database	PostgreSQL 15	Relational data store
Async Queue	Celery 5	Task queue manager
Message Broker	Redis 7	In-memory broker for Celery
Deployment	Docker & Render	Container orchestration & PaaS
Media	Cloudinary	Cloud image storage

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🌍 Deployment Notes (Render Free Tier)

This application is deployed on the Render Free Tier. Please be aware of the following limitations when testing:

• Cold Start Latency: The server "sleeps" after 15 minutes of inactivity. The first request may take up to 50 seconds to wake up the instance. Please be patient; subsequent requests will be instant.
• Resource Limits: The free instance has 512MB RAM. Heavy image uploads may occasionally time out.

Live Endpoints:

• Landing Page: https://prodev-backend.onrender.com/
• Swagger Docs: https://prodev-backend.onrender.com/api/docs/
• Admin Panel: https://prodev-backend.onrender.com/api/admin/

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🔧 Local Setup Guide

Follow these steps to run the project on your machine.

Prerequisites

• Docker & Docker Compose
• Git

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/KingsCreatives/prodev-ecommerce-backend.git
cd prodev-ecommerce-backend

2. Configure Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the root directory (or infra/docker/ depending on your setup):

# Core
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=unsafe-secret-key-for-dev
DJANGO_DEBUG=True
DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS=localhost,127.0.0.1

# Database
POSTGRES_DB=ecommerce
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
POSTGRES_HOST=db
POSTGRES_PORT=5432

# Redis & Celery
REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379/1
CELERY_BROKER_URL=redis://redis:6379/0
CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND=redis://redis:6379/0

# Cloudinary (Optional for local dev, required for images)
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=your_cloud_name
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=your_api_key
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=your_api_secret

3. Start with Docker

Run the entire stack (Django, Postgres, Redis, Celery) with one command:

docker-compose up --build

4. Initialize Database

Once the containers are running, apply migrations and create a superuser:

# Run migrations
docker-compose exec web python src/manage.py migrate

# Create Admin User
docker-compose exec web python src/manage.py createsuperuser

The API will be available at http://localhost:8000/.

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🧪 Testing the API

You can test the API using the included Postman Collection or via the Swagger UI.

Main Workflows

1. Register: POST /api/auth/register/
2. Login: POST /api/auth/login/ (Copy the access token)
3. Create Product (Admin): POST /api/products/
4. Place Order: POST /api/orders/

Note: Check your terminal logs to see the async email task execute!

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📂 Project Structure

prodev-ecommerce-backend/
├── src/               # Application Source Code
│   ├── core/          # Project settings & config
│   ├── accounts/      # User management & Auth
│   ├── products/      # Product catalog & Images
│   ├── carts/         # Shopping cart logic
│   ├── orders/        # Order processing
│   ├── notifications/ # Celery Tasks (Email)
│   └── templates/     # HTML Landing Page
├── infra/             # Infrastructure Configuration
│   ├── docker/        # Dockerfiles & Compose
├── docs/              # Detailed Documentation
│   ├── api/           # Postman Collections
└── scripts/           # Automation Scripts

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Future Roadmap

While the core e-commerce functionality is complete, the following features are planned for the next major release:

• Payment Integration: Stripe/PayPal API integration with webhooks.
• Product Reviews: User feedback and star ratings.
• Advanced Search: Elasticsearch integration for full-text search.

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🤝 Contributing

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'feat: add amazing feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature).
5. Open a Pull Request.