Connect 4

This project was created for educational purposes and to learn new skills in Java and Spring Boot. The technologies used in this project include Spring Boot, Spring Data JDBC, REST API, STOMP over Websocket and ReactJS. The goal of this project was to create a simple application that demonstrates how to build a RESTful API and a real-time WebSocket-based application using Spring Boot and ReactJS.

How to run the application

The minimum required version to run this application is Java 17.

There are two modes / profiles the application can run in. The default profile is memory, which means that the state of the application is stored only in memory. The other available profile is postgres. In that case the app will connect to a postgres database in order to store it's state.

Running in memory mode

Since this is the default mode, you can simply run the app by:

java -jar connect4-1.0.0.jar

Open your browser at http://localhost:8080

Running in postgres mode

You need to switch the active profile to postgres and provide postgres connection details.

java -jar connect4-1.0.0.jar --spring.profiles.active=postgres \
  --spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/connect4 \
  --spring.datasource.username=dbusername \
  --spring.datasource.password=dbpassword

Open your browser at http://localhost:8080

For this you need to have a running postgres database, which has been initialized with the postgres/init.sql file. If you want to run postgres locally on your machine using docker, you can use the makefile in the postgres/ directory:

cd postgres
# set env variables (you might want to adjust the .env file)
source .env
make start

Note that this makefile will probably not work under windows out of the box. You might need to install GNU make first. Or you could run the docker commands manually.

Development Setup

In development mode you need to run a frontend dev server as well as the backend dev server.

To run the frontend:

cd fronted
npm run start

You can open your browser at http://localhost:3000

To run the backend you first need to enable CORS, since the frontend dev server is now separate from the backend. In the src/main/resources/application.properties file set cors.enabled=true. In this file you can also switch the profiles or adjust the postgres connection details.

You can run the backend by opening the project with IntelliJ IDEA and running the main method of the Application class.

Note that when running the tests under the postgres profile, the database will be cleared.