PeerPrep v2.0

PeerPrep is a collaborative coding platform for you to practise coding interviews.
Match with a partner and start coding with them now!

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This project was developed under CS3219 module by Group 38

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Project Report
  • Development
    • Prerequisites
    • Setting up the env secrets
    • Running
    • Ports
    • Swagger documentation
    • Without Docker
  • Deployment
  • Some helpful scripts
    • Make commands
    • Yarn commands
  • Development Team

Introduction

This project features the full-stack project which uses a microservice architecure for backend and React for frontend. PeerPrep is a web application that helps students better prepare themselves for technical whiteboard interviews by providing them with a platform to practise coding questions together with their peers.

The backend consists of 4 microservices:

1. Account Service
2. Matching Service
3. Chat Service
4. Interview Session Service

Project Report

View our Project Report here

Development

This section specifies instructions to run the application locally and test the integration between each services.

For our development environment, we use docker-compose to build and run the different services, as well as download the required images such as Postgres and Redis. The build configuration is defined in the docker-compose.yml file

This workflow provides support for hot-reload so that changes are reflected almost instantenously

Prerequisites

1. Docker
2. docker-compose

Setting up the env secrets

For local development, you will have to add in your own email credentials to support email sending features

1. Navigate to backend/account
2. Rename the .env.sample to .env
3. Update the first 4 environment secrets to connect with your email server using your credentials

   EMAIL_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
   EMAIL_PORT=587
   EMAIL_ID=<your gmail password>
   EMAIL_PASS=<your gmail password>
   

   The other environment variables below can be ignored, as they are defined in the docker-compose.yml file

Running

From the root of this repository, run

$ docker-compose up
$ # or
$ docker-compose up --build  # to detect changes in dependencies and rebuild image

This will spin up both the frontend and backend in development mode (with support for live reload/ watch mode).

If you only need either frontend or specific backend microservice, you can select one of the line below

$ docker-compose up client
$ docker-compose up account
$ docker-compose up chat
$ docker-compose up interview
$ docker-compose up match

To shut down services after you are done, run

$ # Important for updating node modules changes
$ docker-compose down

To clear local postgres data, run the following to clear all volumes

$ docker-compose down -v

Ports

Service	Port
Frontend Client	3000
Backend Server	3001
Account Service	8081
Chat Service	8082
Interview Service	8083
Match Service	8084
Postgres Service	5432
Redis Service	6379

To simulate the Ingress routing in actual deployment, we use Nginx to do route requests to the appropriate microservice

The Nginx routing is exposed on port 3031

Swagger documentation

To allow different team members to quickly understand and familarise with the usage of the different services, we use Swagger Docs to produce REST API Documentation for some services

Service	Swagger Endpoint
Account Service	localhost:8081/api or localhost:3031/api
Chat Service	NIL as it is mostly websocket connection
Interview Service	localhost:8083/interview/api or localhost:3031/interview/api
Match Service	localhost:8084/match/api or localhost:3031/match/api

To simulate the Ingress routing in actual deployment, we use Nginx to do route requests to the appropriate microservice

The Nginx routing is exposed on port 3031

Without Docker

If you choose to run the application without Docker support, you can refer to the README file in each individual microservice.

Note that you will need to have your own instance of Postgres or Redis running locally and also set up the necessary environment variables. More instructions is located in indivudal README

Deployment

For our deployment build, we used kubernetes to orchestrate our docker images. Kubernetes provide support for autoscaling, metrics and pod management.

We deploy our kubernetes cluster onto AWS EKS. For more information refer to the README file in k8s folder.

Some helpful scripts

Make commands

The make commands defined in Makefile help simplify any complex docker-compose command

This commands should be run in the root folder

# Start the docker network
make start

# Start the docker network in detach mode
make run_detach

# Start the docker network and rebuild if changes are detected
make build

# Tear down the network, remove all volumes then bring up the network
make rebuild

# Tear down the network & remove all volumes
make stop

# Tear down the network & only remove node_modules volume (without deleting psql data)
make dependencyclean

# Remove all images and exited containers
make dockerclean

Yarn commands

We use yarn workspaces to reduce installation of duplicated dependency. Here we provide some convenient yarn commands to run throughout the whole repo.

This commands should be run in the root folder

# Dependency installation for all services
yarn install

# Start frontend (with live reload)
yarn fe:start

# Start whole backend (with live reload & no nginx routing)
yarn be:start

# Start specific backend microservice
yarn be:chat:start

# Prettify all files in workspaces
yarn lint

# Login to AWS
yarn aws:login

# Build and update all backend microservices image to AWS ECR
yarn aws:build:all

Development Team

• Keane
• Jin Hao
• Ashley
• Jun Ming