🏠 Habita

Habita is an AI-assisted roommate management app designed to make shared living simpler, more organized, and more connected.
It helps roommates manage tasks, bills, and communication all in one place, reducing daily friction and improving collaboration at home.

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🌟 Product Vision Statement

Habita helps roommates coordinate household responsibilities — from chores to bills — through a single intuitive platform that automates reminders, keeps track of shared duties, and strengthens communication within shared living spaces.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) focuses on three core goals:

1. Allow roommates to create, assign, and track household tasks.
2. Enable bill and payment tracking among roommates.
3. Support simple communication and reminders through a shared dashboard.

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👩‍💻 Core Team Members

Name	Role	GitHub	Other Links
Mavis Liu	Developer	@meiivis	LinkedIn
Steven Oluwabusi	Developer	@St12t
Bilbo Lam	Developer	@BilboLam
Tawhid Zaman	Developer	@TawhidZGit
Buki Seid	Developer	@dibukseid

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🧩 How Habita Came to Be

The idea for Habita originated during brainstorming sessions about how technology can improve daily collaboration in shared spaces.
Our team noticed that many roommates face frustration over unpaid bills, forgotten chores, and miscommunication.
We wanted to create an app that combines organization tools with social features — helping users maintain balance between accountability and friendliness.

Habita was conceptualized as part of the Agile Software Engineering course at NYU, where our team applies Scrum principles to plan, design, and implement the app collaboratively over multiple sprints.

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🤝 Contributing

We welcome feedback and contributions!
To learn about our team workflow, coding guidelines, and setup process, please read our CONTRIBUTING.md.

If you’d like to suggest improvements or report issues, please open a new Issue on GitHub and tag it appropriately (user story, task, or spike).

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🛠️ Build & Test Instructions

Back-End (Express API)

# Install dependencies the first time
cd back-end
npm install

# Start the Express server on http://localhost:4000
npm start

# Run mocha/chai unit tests with c8 coverage
npm test

Create a back-end/.env (see back-end/.env.example) with your MONGODB_URI, JWT_SECRET, optional PORT, and JWT_EXP_DAYS. The server loads these via dotenv at startup.

Key routes currently implemented with mock JSON data:

• GET /api/health – Lightweight status check for monitoring.
• GET /api/notifications / POST /api/notifications / PATCH /api/notifications/:id/read – Notification feed used by the Notifications page and global badges.
• GET /api/notifications/summary / GET /api/notifications/channels – Aggregated counts + metadata for notification widgets.
• GET /api/home/summary – Returns the personalized dashboard snapshot powering the Home page (tasks/bills stats, upcoming lists, calendar events).
• GET /api/chat/threads – Returns chat thread summaries (used by the Chat dashboard and sidebars on Tasks/Bills).
• POST /api/chat/threads – Ensures a thread exists for a given contextType/contextId pair (task/bill chats are created on the fly).
• GET /api/chat/messages?threadId=house (or ?contextType=task&contextId=42) – Fetches message history, creating a thread if needed.
• POST /api/chat/messages – Accepts sender, text, optional contextType, contextId, and participants to append a new chat message.
• PATCH /api/chat/threads/:id/read – Marks a thread as read so unread counts on the Chat UI stay in sync.

These endpoints return deterministic mock JSON so the React app can demo a “live” backend without any real credentials. Static requests to / still serve the HTML hand-off page from back-end/public/index.html.

Front-End (React)

# Install dependencies
cd front-end
npm install

# Start the dev server (proxied to Express on port 3000)
npm start

# Build for production
npm run build

Docker (optional)

• Copy env templates: cp back-end/.env.example back-end/.env and cp front-end/.env.example front-end/.env, then fill in values (e.g., MONGODB_URI, JWT_SECRET, REACT_APP_API_URL).
• Build and run both services together: docker compose up --build.
• Access points (current compose defaults): front-end at http://localhost:3001, back-end at http://localhost:4001.
• Override the API base at build time if needed: REACT_APP_API_URL=http://localhost:4001/api docker compose build front-end.

📚 Additional Documentation

• CONTRIBUTING.md – Team workflow and contribution guidelines
• UX-DESIGN.md – Wireframes, app map, and design documents
• Product Backlog – Current project tasks and user stories
• Sprint Board – Active Scrum task board

Deployed Website Link

64.225.2.238

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© 2025 Habita Team