BruinBook

This repository contains the code for our CS 35L project: BruinBook. BruinBook aims to provide a social media site similar to FaceBook for UCLA students. Both the frontend and backend code can be found in the respective folders. In this README, we will cover how to run the project locally.

Getting Started

You’ll need:

• Git
• Node.js
• MongoDB Atlas
• Cloudinary

Running the Project

Type the following lines in your command line:

$ git clone https://github.com/dylanzhangg/bruinbook.git
$ cd bruinbook/bruinbook-frontend
$ npm install
$ cd ../bruinbook-backend
$ npm install

This will install the necessary dependencies in order to run our project. After that you will need to create a file named .env file in the bruinbook-backend folder. The purpose of this file is to store some of the credentials of the database access.

Contents of .env file:

#Port number for server
PORT=3000
#MongoDB Atlas cluster connection string
DB_URL=replace_with_connection_string
#express-session secret
SESSION_SECRET=replace_with_a_secure_secret
#Cloudinary API Environment variable
CLOUDINARY_URL=replace_with_environment variable

After filling the .env file with a PORT, DB_URL, SESSION_SECRET, and CLOUDINARY_URL, you will be able to run the server on port 3000 by using the command npm run start in the bruinbook-backend folder. Then, start a new terminal session and run npm start in the bruinbook-frontend folder to start the frontend development server. You may run into an error that looks like the following:

This warning occurs because the development server is trying to run on the same port as the backend server. To solve this problem, just type y, and the development server will run on port 3001 instead. Our code runs the backend server on port 3000 and the frontend server on port 3001. If you would like to use different ports, please update the places where ports are used in the code.

If everything worked properly, you should be able to direct your browser to http://localhost:3001/ and see the homepage of our site.

Troubleshooting

If you run into an issue while trying to install dependencies, try running npm install --legacy-peer-deps.