ConnectU

This is a simple social media application.

Problem

Create a mini social network. The application should have features like:-

• Users should be able to sign up/sign in, and create a profile for themselves.
• Search for other users.
• View other users' profiles & make them friends/unfriend them.
• View a list of mutual friends between users. A mutual friend is a user who is a friend of two other users who may or may not know each other.

Solution

A social media application is a web app which requires a lot of interactivity and spontaneous responses from the server. The code for such a website should be optimized to ensure maximum performance. The tech stacks that I used are :

Library/Framework	As	Reason
ReactJS	Frontend	Since ReactJS is best for building highly interactive web apps
Node.js	Backend	To optimize the code performance and have complete control of the backend logic which is not provided by a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) like Firebase
Express.js	API Framework	Easier development of API
MongoDB	Database	To add new features without changing the schema of the database a NoSQL Databse is used and it is also easy to scale the application
Firebase Storage	Storage Bucket	Cheap and Efficient Storage bucket, used for storing profile images

To Run the app

1. Leave a star ⭐ and Clone the repository
2. Open the repository and open the server folder
3. create a new file .env in it's root directory and copy from backend.txt
4. Now open a terminal session and type in the following

npm i
npm run dev

5. This will start the server. Now goto the frontend directory of the repository.
6. Create a .env file and Copy the context from the frontend.txt and paste it.
7. Now open another terminal session and type in the following

npm i
npm run dev

8. Now goto http://127.0.0.1:5173/ where the app will be initialised

API details

The server is built using Node.js and Express, and uses JWT for authentication. By default the server will be running in port 3000 which can be changed by simple changing the PORT value in the .env file.

Authentication

All authenticated routes require a valid JWT token to be included in the Authorization header of the request.

Authorization: Bearer <Token>

Routes

Route	HTTP Method	Description
/	GET	Returns "Hello World!"
/users	GET	Returns a list of all users. Requires authentication.
/signup	POST	Creates a new user account.
/login	POST	Authenticates a user and returns a JWT token.
/logout	POST	Logs out the current user. Requires authentication.
/getUser/:id	GET	Returns information about the user with the specified ID. Requires authentication.
/send/:id	POST	Sends a friend request to the user with the specified ID. Requires authentication.
/accept	POST	Accepts a friend request. Requires authentication.
/unfriend/:id	POST	Unfriends the user with the specified ID. Requires authentication.
/mutual/:id	POST	Returns a list of mutual friends with the user with the specified ID. Requires authentication.
/friends	POST	Returns a list of all friends. Requires authentication.
/friendrequests	POST	Returns a list of all friend requests. Requires authentication.
/cancel/:id	POST	Cancels a friend request. Requires authentication.
/ignore/:id	POST	Ignores a friend request. Requires authentication.
/confirm/:id	POST	Checks if the specified user is a friend or if a friend request has been sent. Requires authentication.

Demo

2023-03-19_22-58-14.mp4

Link to the video file -> Demo Video

Screenshots

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