Team-12-UniLend

Welcome to our UniLend app

A peer-to-peer items lending platform for universities

Tech Stack

Frontend (Mobile)

• React Native with Expo framework
• react-native-firebase for connecting with firebase
• zod for form validation
• "@futurejj/react-native-checkbox" checkbox component

(NOTE: We are using firebase-auth for authentication and firestore for storing user data)

Backend (For signing signatures for cloudinary):

• Node.js
• Express.js
• Typescript
• firebase admin sdk
• Cloudinary Admin API

Role: The backend is used for signing signatures for frontend, to upload images in cloudinary

Prerequisites

• Node.js (Latest version)
• npm
• Firebase account (if using Firebase)
• Expo account (required if using eas builds)
• Cloudinary account (required for image storage)

Installation

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/Manik2375/Team-12-UniLend
cd Team-12-UniLend

Frontend setup

There are 2 ways to run the app. You can either run it in emulator like Android Studio or use expo development build.

NOTE: We can't run the application in expo go, because react-native-firebase uses native modules, which are not present in expo go

Learn more about development build: https://docs.expo.dev/develop/development-builds/introduction/

To install packages:

# run at root directory
npm install

Now, you have to create a build to run the app. You can either:

• Build locally: https://docs.expo.dev/guides/local-app-development/

• Build using EAS build: http://docs.expo.dev/tutorial/eas/configure-development-build/ (We are focusing on eas build for development in your smartphone)

When using EAS build, install the development app in your mobile.

After build is done, run

# Start expo 
npm run start

NOTE: If using eas build, you can use your mobile native scanner app to scan the QR code to start development.

Backend Setup

If expo is currently running, then open a new terminal and

1. Go the backend directory

cd backend

2. Install required dependencies

npm install

3. Go back to root directory

cd ../

4. Use npm run serverStart to start backend server

NOTE: If you are using EAS build for developing (in your mobile), we need to change the ip address used in fetch calls. If you are using windows run ipconfig to get your local IP address and paste it in src/api/cloudinary/upload.ts signatureResponse call. (In Linux you can use ip addr command)

Required secret files

For firebase in our frontend application, we require google-services.json.

In backend, for firebase-admin-sdk we need service-account-key JSON file.

And for rest, the structure of .env file

CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=""
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=""
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=""

NODE_ENV="development"

Endpoints in backend

• GET / - Home page, nothing special other than greeting
• GET /get-signature - Get cloudinary upload signature