RippleLink Backend

Links to the Frontend:

https://github.com/EduardStroescu/RippleLink-Frontend - Github Repo https://ripple-link.vercel.app - Live Demo

Links to backend main page and swagger documentation:

https://ripple-link.koyeb.app - Live Demo https://ripple-link.koyeb.app/api/docs - Swagger Documentation

Introduction

Full-Stack live calls and messaging service using SocketIO, WebRTC and NestJS with MongoDB and Cloudinary for File uploads.

Technologies Used

• nestjs - API Management
• socket.io - Realtime Communication
• ioredis - Redis Cache
• @nestjs-modules/ioredis - Ioredis Adapter for NestJS
• mongodb - Database
• mongoose - ORM for database management
• passport - Authentication
• bcrypt - Password Encryption
• jsonwebtoken - JWT Authentication
• cloudinary - File Uploads
• docker - Image creation for production
• dotenv - Environment Variables
• swagger - Documentation

Description

The RippleLink backend is built using NestJS and MongoDB w/ Mongoose and uses Redis from a Docker instance for caching. Cloudinary is used for File Uploads. Authentication is done through passport with JWT tokens. Also used as a WebRTC signaling server.

Installation

$ npm install

Setup Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the root directory and add the following variables:

# The port to run the server on, defaults to 3000.

PORT=

# The client url tied to the backend.

CLIENT_URL=

# The database url tied to the backend. Obtained from MongoDB.

MONGODB_URI=

# JWT secrets for authentication.

ACCESS_SECRET=
REFRESH_SECRET=

# Cloudinary credentials for avatar uploads. See https://cloudinary.com/.

CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=

# Redis credentials.

REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379 for Dev or redis://:<PASSWORD>redis:6379 for Prod.
REDIS_PASSWORD=""

# Credentials for the admin user to reset redis cache if needed. Not needed to be added to the database at all.

ADMIN_ID=""
ADMIN_PASSWORD=""

Running the app

Running a Redis instance is required for the app to run. The instance can be run locally (natively or using Docker) or remotely.

# watch mode
$ npm run start:dev

# production mode
$ npm run start:prod

Building for Production

The following are the manual steps to build the image for production, but I've also included a github action that will build and push the image to DockerHub.

# build docker image from Dockerfile
docker build -t {{username}}/ripple-link:latest . --no-cache

# push to DockerHub
docker push {{username}}/ripple-link:latest

push repo to GitHub

deploy to e.g. Koyeb from github repo - requires Dockerfile.koyeb for Koyeb to use docker-compose for the build stage. Expose port 3000 on path "/" and health checks on path "/api/health" - port 3000.