HackerNews project - Group 7

Table of Contents

Group members
How to run the project Tool stack
CI/CD pipeline
Deployment Database schema

Group members

Member	Email address
Plamen	plamengetsov95@gmail.com
Florent	kryptag@gmail.com
Edmond	edipetres@gmail.com
Emil	emilklausen2@hotmail.com
Zygimantas	pr.zygimantas@gmail.com

How to run the project

Install dependencies

npm install

Compiles and hot-reloads for development (back and frontend)

npm start

Other Commands

Compiles and minifies for production

npm run build

Run your tests

npm run test

Lints and fixes files

npm run lint

Run your end-to-end tests

npm run test:e2e

Run your unit tests

npm run test:unit

Tool stack

Service	Tool	Comment
Frontend	Vue.js
Backend	Node.js, Express.js
CI/CD pipeline	CircleCI	https://circleci.com/gh/edipetres/HackerNewsG7
Version Control	Github	https://github.com/edipetres/HackerNewsG7
Deployment	AWS	Using AWS, we have changed our deployment strategy
Database	Mongodb	https://mlab.com/
	Backend Template Project	express-mongo-example
	Keys, env vars, credentials and how-tos	Google docs

CI/CD pipeline

See pipeline in CircleCI here

Find the pipeline configuration file here

1. Checkout code from Github
2. Run tests
3. Build production code
4. Deploy frontend to AWS S3
5. Deploy backend API to AWS ElasticBeanstalk
6. Release version on Github - We have chosen to do manual releases.

Environment variables

Set these environment variables in the CircleCI pipeline settings

Key	Value
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	xxxxAVCQ
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	xxxxnnLR
S3_BUCKET_NAME	xxxxoup7

Deployment

Both our back and frontend code lives in this project, but they are deployed to separate AWS services.

Frontend

After the CI chain builds the static frontend files it uploads them to an S3 bucket. This bucket is configured for Static Website Hosting. It does that by serving the index.html file at the root of the bucket.

Public endpoint for the frontend: http://hackernews-group7.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/

Note

It is important to add the following Policy to the bucket to allow public access to all files - this way everyone on the internet can access our website. Without this policy you will get a 403 Access Forbidden error when navigating to the URL endpoint.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [{
    "Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Principal": "*",
    "Action": "s3:GetObject",
    "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::hackernews-group7/*"
  }]
}

Backend

Express.js powers our backend API which is deployed to Elastic Beanstalk.

First we manually created an application on EB and a Node.js environment. Using the aws-cli tool we configured the project locally to deploy to this environment (using eb init) - this configuration can be found here. We commit this configuration file which allows the CI chain to know where to deploy the app when running the eb deploy command.

Public IP for our backend API: http://52.28.201.249:3000/

Note

It is important to allow all inbound traffic to the server, otherwise our request will time out. You can do that manually by navigating to the EC2 instance the ElasticBeanstalk environment created for us and edit the attached Security Group: add a custom TCP rule to inboud traffic on port 3000 (the port your API server is listening on) and allow all traffic (0.0.0.0/0, ::/0). See image below.

Graphs by the Simulator

Latest sent hannest_ids Error responses Response times

Database schema

We drafted the following sketch for the database schema for our MongoDB.

To-do:

1. Add title to Post schema DB object