comatory / portion-tracker

Track your food portions during the day. This app contains both backend & frontend.

I created this simple app for myself, I wanted something simple for recording what time I eat at and the size of the portions. This should help anyone get a better idea of their eating habits. The app will eventually run as PWA (Progressive Web App) which means it can work offline.

This repository contains backend application written in Node and ExpressJS and the frontend app written in React. You can host your own instance or use mine at https://portion-tracker.herokuapp.com to create your own account.

Development

Server / backend app is stored in the root directory. This app is served on port 3000.

Frontend app is stored in frontend/ directory and is served on port 3001

Requirements

• Node.js 8.10.0
• PostgreSQL 10.4
• screen (optional)

Installation

Set permissions for install.sh, run.sh and kill.sh like this:

chmod +x install.sh
chmod +x run.sh
chmod +x kill.sh

Never run these commands in production, they're intended only for development purposes.

You must install both apps to launch them locally. For this run shell script install.sh. After this you can start up both development servers (backend & frontend) by running . ./run.sh.

Env file

You should create your own .env file in the root directory. Check .env.example for the variables that you'll need.

Running development servers

Recommended way to run the servers is to launch ./run.sh screen. You can attach to sessions that were created within the run script. These sessions have all the output available to them. Using screen has the advantage of those screen sessions being available in any terminal session.

NOTE: You can attach by using command: screen -x SCREEN_SESSION_ID. If you CTRL+C there, it will also terminate the server. Type screen -ls to list all screens.

If you don't have screen installed or you prefer looking at logs directly, just run . ./run.sh.

NOTICE: Don't forget the dot . before the name of the script, otherwise the kill script will not work.

The terminal session that you used to launch this command is still attached to the process so do not terminate it. You can get the logs from the logs/ directory. For example, you could probably run tail -f ./logs/frontend.log to get output from frontend server.

Stopping development servers

If you've used ./run.sh screen you should terminate the servers from within the screen session. If you've used jut . ./run.sh, then press ^C in the terminal session. This should get you to prompt, terminate the processes by launching kill.sh. To see the PIDs directly, they will be stored in environment variables: PT_BACKEND_PROCESS and PT_FRONTEND_PROCESS.

Install & run manually

Alternatively, you can just install & launch apps from within their respective directories. Run npm install in root and then cd to frontend/ and run npm install there as well.

For backend, run the app in dev mode: npm run start:dev. For frontend, go to frontend/ and launch npm run start.

Debugging development server

There is a script to run back end server with --inspect option. It'll run nodemon on port 12345. You can attach to this port in Visual Studio Code using the configuration .vscode/launch.json.

Deployment

The package.json file is set up to work with Heroku service. Feel free to modify this to your needs. Set up production environment by adding remote named heroku, for staging environment add remote named staging to ensure the scripts work properly. If you want to preview the production frontend app in development backend server, run npm run heroku-postbuild. This will build the frontend app and place it into public/ directory, the backend server then reads it from there. Do not forget to run npm run db:seed:production to add required data. Alternatively if you have staging environment run npm run db:seed:staging.

Heroku

This app was designed to work with Heroku service and their PostgreSQL add-on. Do not forget to set up env variable SESSION_SECRET on your Heroku instance (see also .env.example file). This variable will set up password on the session store.

Staging

To deploy to staging server, run npm run deploy:staging.

Production

To deploy to staging server, run npm run deploy:production.

Required data / Seeds

After the first deployment of the app, you must run npm run db:seed:production which will run all seeds located in ./seeders. This sets up default roles and other data required for the proper functioning of the app (including the admin user). Feel free to modify this for your needs.

Email

App uses Sendgrid service to implement emails. There is only single email that gets delivered to user and that is to verify signed up user. You need to have Sendgrid account and provide variables SENDGRID_API_KEY with your API key and SENDGRID_APP_EMAIL for the app email (sender).