STEP Capstone project "Notesboard" by apodob@ and paulkovalov@

Our project is an attempt to improve WFH experience for googlers who got used to notesboards they have in offices. Our app is a virtual notesboard where you can leave notes and invite other people to collaborate.

To deploy the app, run ./deploy.sh

To run frontend locally, execute

cd sticknotes-frontend
ng serve

To run backend locally, run datastore emulator firstly using gcloud beta emulators datastore start --host-port=localhost:8484 --no-store-on-disk. Next execute

cd sticknotesbackend
./run.sh

To run tests, launch datastore emulator with gcloud beta emulators datastore start --host-port=localhost:8484 --no-store-on-disk. Next execute

cd sticknotesbackend
mvn test

Running locally caveats

Backend part is written in Java 8, and needs Java 8 JDK for running. Make sure that env variable's JAVA_HOME value is a path to the jdk, and java --version outputs something like 1.8.___

Frontend requires angular cli to be installed. To install it, you need to install npm package manager. It comes with Node.js, so you can install Node.js, and npm must be installed automatically link. To check the installation, run npm -v. Next, install angular using this command npm install -g @angular/cli, the installation command is taken from here.

Deployment caveats

App was designed for Google App Engine Standard Environment. This is very important detail, app will not work in any other GAE environment or anywhere else, because it uses Google API SDKs provided by App Engine. When deploying app, make sure gc project has enabled:

1. Translation API
2. Memcache (not Memcached), though it was enabled by default, it may change over time, so it is a good idea to double check that it is active.
3. Cloud Storage API. In Cloud Storage, create a bucket, choose whatever location type you wish (we chose same region as where app was deployed), select "standard" for storage class, select "uniform" for access-control. When bucket is created, make sure read access is granted to everyone who needs access to app (we used @google.com). Next, go to appengine-web.xml and update environment variables there. Put GC project id to PROJECT_ID and name of the new bucket to the GCS_BUCKET_NAME.