GTBitsOfGood / VolunTrack

Volunteer and Event Management Platform

A Volunteer and Event Management Platform for Nonprofits

Stack

• React.js: Front-end
• Next.js: API routes and server-side rendering
• MongoDB: Permanently storing info
• MailerSend: Transaction emails (forgot password, reg confirmation, etc.)
• Netlify: Deployment and preview envs
• eslint: Automatically identifying and fixing code errors
• prettier: Setting a common code style and fixing any issues. If you would like to adjust any prettier settings like quote style or include semicolons, look in .prettierrc
• yarn: Package management. If you do not have yarn, run npm install -g yarn to install yarn globally.

Setup

Initializing Env Vars

• If you are an EM setting up a project for the first time, read the Bitwarden guide here before continuing forward.
• Run yarn secrets to sync development secrets from Bitwarden and save them to a local .env file. Contact a leadership member for the Bitwarden password.
  • Note: If you are using Windows, enter yarn secrets:login and then yarn secrets:sync instead of the above script.

Updating Env Vars

• For dev, update .env and next.config.js
• For production, add the env vars to your host, NEVER commit .env to your version control system.

MongoDB

A running instance of MongoDB is required this project.

• Decide if you want to run MongoDB locally or remotely
• Locally (Docker (RECOMMENDED))
  1. Download Docker Desktop
  2. Run docker run --name mongodb -d -p 27017:27017 mongo in your terminal
  3. Open Docker Desktop and confirm that your MongoDB image is running. It should exist on port 27017, and can be accessed.
• Locally (Non-Docker)
  1. Download MongoDB Community Server
  2. Go through the installation instructions.
     • Leave the port at default 27017
• Remotely
  1. Create a MongoDB instance on MongoDB Atlas
  2. In Security → Network Access: add the IP address 0.0.0.0/0 (all IPs)
  3. In Security → Database Access: Add new database user
  4. In Data Storage → Clusters: Find your cluster and click Connect → Connect your application and copy the connection string, set the username and password, and set this as MONGO_DB in .env
• Create the nextjs database. (or choose another name, but make sure to change it in .env)
• It's very helpful to install MongoDB Compass to see your database contents

Node

Make sure you use Node 16. You can check your node version by running node -v.

Running

Run With Docker (Preferred)

1. Install Docker
2. Start the application with Docker Compose: docker compose up

If you make any changes to the packages, you may need to rebuild the images. To do this, append --build to the above docker compose up command.

The Dockerized application will have live-reloading of changes made on the host machine.

Note: On linux-based operating systems, if you come across an entrypoint permission error (i.e. process: exec: "./entrypoint.sh": permission denied: unknown), run chmod +x ./entrypoint.sh to make the shell file an executable.

Windows Users: If you come across this error exec ./entrypoint.sh: no such file or directory when running the docker compose command, please follow this Stackoverflow thread to fix it.

Development

To understand this code better, read the Code Tour.

1. Run yarn
2. Run yarn dev

Production

1. Setup your host/vm and the necessary env vars
2. Run yarn install
3. Run yarn start

Styling

• By default, this repository uses Next ^9.2.0 for styles, which includes native support for global CSS and CSS modules
• However, this version only allows global css to be in pages/_app.js, which can cause issues with external packages
• If you face this error, the solution is installing @zeit/next-css and adding it to next.config.js, however you cannot use css modules and global css together with this package (and it defaults to global).