Development Status: Completed
The backend in this repository is no longer in development. It is being rewritten in Go and is located in the repository matttm/reddit-clone-backend.
A GraphQL based web application meant to be an immitation of Reddit.
There are some important design decisions I want to discuss.
Firstly is the app's authentication. I initially was going to just use a token, stored in local storage for authentication, but because the app uses NextJS, which allows for server side rendering, I would not aalways have access to local storage. So, for authentication, I delegated the login request from a fetcher to Next's API routes, inorder to store a secure cookie. I also wanted this authentication state to be available globally as it is being used in multiple components, so for this, I made use of React's Context API.
So when logging in ffor instance, a request is made to Nexts 's /login route, and that handler gets the tokenn from the GraphQL server and stores it as a cookie for between the UI and the server side code. This way, the cookie is available in the main app's getInitialProps, and is used to authenticate the user on every request to the server, for the user's entire time on the site. After authenticating, the status is then stored in React's global context.
Since the GraphQL library that I am using is invoked on the client's machine, the token was also needed in the browser, independent of requests to Next, so the /login route also sends the token back to the client. Thien it is stored in local storage and used for subsequent GraphQL requets. This part may be rewritten at some point to make the auth token entirely cookie based.
First install the desired dependencies by running the following, in the project root
npm i
After starting the backend as described in its own repo, run the following in another terminal
npm run dev
If you need to add a migration, the migrations folder must be specified
From the backend folder:
npx typeorm migration:generate -n migratin-name -d src/migration- Matt Maloney : matttm
If you want to contribute, just send me a message.