How to build the application

Tax-app is a simple tax calculation application build with Php Laravel REST API in the backend and ReactJS for the frontend. Laravel sail is used to setup docker environment for the application (React app excluded).

Sail is the docker-compose.yml file and the sail script that is stored at the root of your project. The sail script provides a CLI with convenient methods for interacting with the Docker containers defined by the docker-compose.yml file.

Please follow the steps to build the application.

1. If the application is being cloned for the first time, then, none of the application's Composer dependencies, including Sail, will be installed after you clone the application's repository to your local computer. This command uses a small Docker container containing PHP and Composer to install the application's dependencies:

   docker run --rm \
      -u "$(id -u):$(id -g)" \
      -v "$(pwd):/var/www/html" \
      -w /var/www/html \
      laravelsail/php81-composer:latest \
      composer install --ignore-platform-reqs
   

2. The tax-app directory has a .env.example file which need to be duplicated and renamed as .env. This file contains all the environment variables necessary to run the application.

3. In order to run the docker containers, ./vendor/bin/sail build. Alternatively, after setting up the alias for vendor/bin/sail only sail build command will work. Create an alias by adding alias sail='[ -f sail ] && sh sail || sh vendor/bin/sail' line to your shell configuration file in your home directory, such as ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc, and then restart your shell. The documentation will assume that you have added the alias and include sail instead of ./vendor/bin/sail.

4. Run sail up to run docker containers

5. Now, our backend is up and running on docker containers. The database migration need to run. Run sail artisan migrate:fresh to migrate the tables in the database. A demo data seeder can be used to test the application. Run sail artisan db:seed to seed demo data.

6. The frontend directory have the ReactJs application inside it. Go inside this directory and run npm install && npm start

7. Now you can visit Localhost and use the application.

Running tests:

Backend Test: Run sail artisan test command in your terminal inside project directory

Frontend Test: Inside frontend directory in your terminal run npm test

No time to build, feel free to check my demo video.

If you want to take a quick look at the app with it's functionality and review the code, access the demo video HERE