sbhbenjamin / PeerPrep

A platform that matches developers to solve programming problems.

PeerPrep

PeerPrep is a platform that matches developers to conduct mock technical interviews. It features real-time matching between two clients, live-chat between two connected users, and a Question-of-the-day feature to make it easy for you to get started solving problems quickly!

Landing Page - The main entry point for PeerPrep users, showcasing the initial interface.	Dashboard - Users can view their progress, history, or get started tackling the Question of the Day
Matching Page - Where users are matched with peers for conducting mock interviews.	Questions Repository - A repository of questions for admins to add and manage questions.

Quick Start Guide

Our development setup revolves around Docker, where all backend services are dockerised in a single docker-compose. This setup allows for hot-reloading as well, as the containers are setup with volumes that point to the respective directories. This means that if a file changes in the directory, it will be reflected within the container as they are pointing to the same files. As such, we have to do the necessary setups for each service before running the containers. This setup could include installing dependencies, setting up the database clients, etc. For this, we have defined convenience scripts for the ease of setup.

The frontend does not support containerisation due to certain quirks with Next.js 13, thus you can run it standalone in your terminal.

Setup root dependencies

The root package.json defines some convenience scripts that we will be using during development. To set them up, we have to install the root dependencies first.

npm install

Setup all services

We automate npm i in all services through a convenience script that can be used in the root directory. This runs npm i in all of the microservices concurrently, and runs post-scripts i.e. postinstall in all of them as well to setup the databases, etc.

npm run install:services

Setup Frontend

1. Navigate to services/frontend.

   cd frontend
   

2. Create a .env with the following attributes

   NEXT_PUBLIC_SERVICE_USER_URL=localhost:2001
   NEXT_PUBLIC_SERVICE_QUESTION_URL=localhost:5001
   NEXT_PUBLIC_SERVICE_HISTORY_URL=localhost:1001
   NEXT_PUBLIC_GITHUB_ClIENT_ID=/** fill this in */
   NEXT_PUBLIC_GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=/** fill this in */
   NEXTAUTH_URL=http://localhost:3000
   NEXTAUTH_SECRET=/** fill this in */
   

Start all services

The following command requires Docker (we recommend installing Docker Desktop). This command will spin up the containers defined in the docker-compose.dev.yml, as well as running the frontend.

1. Run all services

npm run dev

2. Go to http://localhost:3000 on your browser to access the frontend.
3. If you encounter any odd issues, check that all of your containers are running via Docker Desktop

Troubleshooting

Docker

If you encounter any issues with the containers, we have defined convenience scripts to remove the volumes, prune them, etc.

/** in root directory */

// stops all running containers
npm run stop

// restarts the containers
npm run restart

// removes the volumes attached to the containers and stops them
npm run cleanup