Hermes

Project Management system written in MERN stack.

Table of contents

Description
Features
Technology stack
Architecture
Project structure
Security
User Interface examples
TODO
Licence

Description

Hermes is an open-source web application providing a set of tools designed to perform tasks in the Project Management field. Users can organize into companies, organizational units and teams in order to perform various tasks related to predefined projects.

One of the key features of Hermes is a complete isolation of company's workspace which allows its users to keep their confidential data safe. In other words, users can only access information related directly to their company/organizational unit/team.

Features

• re-create your company's structure in Hermes by organizing your employees into organizational units and teams
• create and manage your projects as well as their related tasks via simple, straightforward User Interface
• keep your company's data safe from unfair competition and strangers by isolating your workspace
• JoditEditor allows user to easily embed HTML tags and custom formatting in text description of project, task or team
  
  
  

Technology stack

Hermes was created in MERN stack which incorporates the following technologies:

• MongoDB
• ExpressJS
• React
• Node.js
  
  

Architecture

Hermes is a full-stack application consisting of separate client and server sub services. Communication between these services is provided by REST API implemented on backend and is actively used in various CRUD-related operations and is a core element of Token Based Authentication.

Figure 1. Client-Server communication Flow within Hermes

Data exchange between client and server is entirely based on async/await and global Promises approach, which allowed for increasing data integrity between certain endpoints and made the whole system generally more resilient to multi-access and high traffic scenarios.

Project structure

Client

• /public - root directory for serving static content
  
  • /images - directory for public images served by client application
    
• /src - core directory in client project
  
  • /assets - directory storing CSS stylesheets, custom scripts etc.
    
    • /css - CSS styles directory
      
  • /components - root directory of all React class based components
    
  • /middleware - contains client-side handler for Token Based Authentication along with translation middleware responsible for managing LocalStorage
    
  • /services - currently stores only i18n translation service
    
  • /translations - root directory of translations
    
    • /pl - Polish translation via common.json
      
    • /en - English translation via common.json
      
      
      

Figure 2. Component hierarchy in client app

Server

• /public - root directory for serving static content
  
  • /images - directory for public images served by server application
    
• /src - core directory in server project
  
  • /config - currently stores only Passport config with definition of Local/Jwt strategies
    
  • /middleware - contains authentication, data validation and error handlers
    
  • /models - implements data models used by mongoose library
    
  • /routes - root directory of REST API routes
    
    • /protected - routes protected by authentication middleware
      
    • /public - routes publicly accessible without authentication
      
  • /services - root directory of services related to user registration and Atlas cloud
    
    • /db - MongoDB transactional services
      
      
      

Security

Hermes uses a session-less, Token Based Authentication system. It consists of several aspects:

• it uses a pair of JWT tokens - access and refresh
• every route stored in /routes/protected directory has applied authentication middleware ensuring that user requesting specific resource is authenticated
• LocalStrategy handles Basic Auth employed in /auth/login route
• JwtStrategy handles access to restricted resources via Bearer Token
• Sensitive information like DB url, username or password are stored in environmental variables and are managed by dotenv library. For security reasons, .env file is disconnected from Git version control system.
• both in registration and authentication flow, password is encrypted by bcrypt library and its hash is stored in Atlas cloud.
  
  

Figure 3. User Authentication Flow

Figure 4. Access/Refresh token characteristics and differences

User Interface examples

Figure 5. Dashboard view	Figure 6. Team overview
Figure 7. Create new project	Figure 8. Project overview

TODO

Licensing

Hermes is being distributed under GPL-3.0 licence.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html