TradeHub - IIITH Market Place

TradeHub is an e-commerce platform that allows users to buy and sell products. It is developed as a part of the Design and Analysis of Software Systems course at IIIT Hyderabad. The platform is built using MERN stack.

Libraries Used:

• Frontend:

  • React: JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
  • Zustand: State management library.
  • Axios: Promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js
  • React Router: Declarative routing for React.
  • Filepond: A JavaScript library that can upload anything you throw at it, optimizes images for faster uploads, and offers a great, accessible, silky smooth user experience.
  • React-hot-toast: A super easy toast library for React applications.
  • React-icons: Popular icons for React projects.
  • Motion: Animation library for React.
  • Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.
  • React-Helmet: A document head manager for React.
  • Google-generative-ai: A library for powering the chatbot using Google's generative AI models, Gemini 1.5 Flash in this case.

• Backend:

  • Express: Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js.
  • Mongoose: MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.
  • Multer: Node.js middleware for handling multipart/form-data.
  • JWT: JSON Web Token is a compact, URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties.
  • Bcrypt: A library to help you hash passwords.
  • Cors: A package for providing a Connect/Express middleware that can be used to enable CORS with various options.
  • Dotenv: A zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env.
  • Cloudinary: Cloudinary is a cloud service that offers a solution to a web application's entire image management pipeline.

How to run

• Clone the repository
• Run npm install in the root, frontend and backend directories
• Create a .env file in the backend directory and add the following environment variables:
  • MONGO_URI: MongoDB connection string
  • JWT_SECRET: Secret key for JWT
  • CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME: Cloudinary cloud name
  • CLOUDINARY_API_KEY: Cloudinary API key
  • CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET: Cloudinary API secret
• Create a .env file in the frontend directory and add the following environment variables:
  • VITE_BACKEND_URL: Backend API URL
  • VITE_GEMINI_API_KEY: Gemini API key for chat support
• Run npm run start in the root directory.
• Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser