GraduateNU

GraduateNU aims to empower Northeastern students to customize their plan of study through an intuitive and flexible interface shaped by student feedback.

Running the application locally

1. Make sure you run the dev postgres database using yarn dev:db:up. Run yarn dev:db:down when you're done.

2. Make a copy of the packages/api/.env.development and name it .env.development.local. Fill in placeholder secrets.

3. Make a copy of the packages/api/.env.testing and name it .env.testing.local. for running BE tests

4. If you haven't run migrations in a while or this is a fresh repo, then run the migrations for the the api using yarn packages/api dev:migration:run. See packages/API/README for more info.

5. Then run the new version of the application by running yarn dev at the root of the project. This starts up a NestJS server + a NextJS frontend + a Proxy. The proxy listens on port 3002, forwards /api requests to the NestJS server running on port 3001, and all other requests to the frontend running on port 3000.

5a. For Windows machines, run yarn concurrently "yarn workspaces foreach --parallel --verbose --interlaced run dev" "yarn dev:proxy" instead of yarn dev

6. Visit http://localhost:3002 to view the app.

To run the two separately, visit the frontend and api packages(sub directories of the monorepo).

Running the prod builds in prod docker configurations locally

We use docker and prod builds for our production app. It is a good idea to test out whether the app builds and runs the way it would in production.

NOTE: We don't support running the full stack production app locally yet. It can be done through NGIX, I am lazy.

• To run just the frontend
  • yarn frontend:docker:build and yarn frontend:docker:run.
  • Visit the containerized frontend at port 4000.
• To run just the backend
  • yarn backend:docker:build and yarn backend:docker:run.
  • Visit the containerized API at port 4001.
  • To stop the container run yarn backend:docker:down.
  • To debug, use docker compose --verbose for the build and run commands depending on which one is failing.

Monorepo

This is a monorepo powered by Yarn workspaces. The different components of the GraduateNU application exist within their own workspace directory in /packages.

You can run a command for a specific workspace from the root directory via yarn packages/<package> <command>, where <command> can be a yarn command like add typescript, a custom script like dev, or a bin script like tsc.

Example: yarn packages/frontend lint

The workspaces within this monorepo are:

1. frontend: A Next.js web UI. It is what users see when they visit our application.

2. api: A Nest.js API reponsible for storing and managing Graduate's data. Our frontend leans on our api for data related services.

3. api-client: A typescript client responsible for providing a streamlined and typed interface to interact with our API. The frontend uses this client to send request to our API.

4. common: All common types and logic used by our frontend, api and scrapers.