My-School-Server

• RESTful API for a School Management System
• Features:
  • Schedules (for teachers & students)
  • Uplodad/Download subject materials
  • Fees inequiry
  • Grades inequiry

What I am working on:

• Code-wise
  • API Pagination #37
  • API Versioning #37
  • To OOP? (Maybe) #47
  • Better Error handling
  • Validations related #34
    • Trying to make sure that different entities are always in a valid state
• Docs - SwaggerHub Link
  • Better & more detailed Readme #46
  • API Docs #40

Backend Stack (Modules) so far:

• Nodejs & Express - JS Runtime & HTTP Server
• PassportJS - Authentication
• Express-Session - Session Manager
• Amazon SDK - DBs & Emails Not used yet
• Morgan - Logger
• Jest - API Testing
• Prettier & Eslint - Linting & Formatting
• AWS - IaaS
• Docker - Development Environment

Starting up the development environment

Pre-requisistes:

• Docker
  • This is strictly required for the Database to work, any local/cloud PostgreSQL database would do the job.
• NodeJS

Steps:

• After cloning the repo, open a terminal in your favourite IDE:

1. Start the DBs
   • In a terminal docker compose -f postgres-compose.yml up
2. Install dependencies
   • npm install
3. Change .sample.env to .env
4. Run the tests & make sure all of them pass:
   • npm run test
5. Run the app
   • npm run dev
6. API Docs can be visited at http://localhost:8080/api-docs/

Development related:

• Docker:
  • docker compose -f postgres-compose.yml up for running PostgreSQL.
  • docker exec -it postgres-db psql for getting into psql terminal.
• Run specific test
  • npm run test -- -t '<name>'
• Resetting DB:
  • Through psql:
    • DROP TABLE <all table names>
    • DELETE FROM pg_type WHERE typnamespace=2200;
    • Trivial SELECT typname, typnamespace FROM pg_type WHERE typnamespace=2200;
  • Through sequelize using umzug:
    • npm run migration:downAll
• Access EC2 instance:
  • Make sure that the Security Group allows SSH from your IP.
  • ssh -i "C:\Users\Lenovo\.ssh\<.pem file>" <rest of aws ip>
• Access RDS instance:
  • psql <postgres_url>

Decisions:

• Use of AWS's Infrastructure as opposed to VPS or a group of containers generally.
• Using Angular for Frontend.
• Not using a proper framework for Backend. (or both FE & BE)
• Use of PassportJS for authentication as opposed to 3rd party auth services (e.g. AWS Cognito) & open source ones (e.g. Ory Hydra).
• How to store files?
  • Server storage ✅ (for now), AWS S3, MinIO, OpenStack Swift
• Validating input (and possibily sanitizing?)
  • express-validator (very JS), runtypes, zod ✅ (puerly based on it being most used), others...
• Starting with sequelize, then ?eventually? switching to sequelize-typescript.