NestJS backend for the News Mobile App

About

Welcome to the News App Backend project! This repository serves as the backend component for the News App, a Flutter application designed to deliver the latest news to users. The backend is built to provide data and functionality to support the app's features.

Backend is built using NestJS, a NodeJS framework. It is a REST API that provides endpoints for the app to consume. For data storage, the backend uses MySQL and interacts with it using TypeORM.

This project is made as a sample project and implements some of the common features found in a typical backend application. List of features:

• REST Api (CRUD operations)
• GraphQL basics (query, mutation)
• Authentication and Authorization (JWT, basic auth, username/password login)
• Testing (Jest)
• Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) push notifications (via firebase-admin)
• Sending emails
• Exporting data to Excel file
• File uploads and downloads
• Dockerization
• Cron jobs
• Sentry error logging
• Serving static files
• Migration scripts
• Exception filters
• Logging to file and managing log files

Demo

A demo of the backend can be found at https://news.belligerator.cz/api/. The demo is running on a Docker container.

For that purpose I have created a docker image for the backend. The image can be found at https://hub.docker.com/r/belligerator/news-backend. The image is built using the Dockerfile in the root directory of this repository.

On the server, there is docker-compose file that is used to run the backend and MySQL database. The file can be found at https://github.com/Belligerator/news-docker.

Mobile application

Mobile application is built using Flutter (v3.7.1) and source codes can be found at https://github.com/Belligerator/news-app. It is connected to the demo backend and can be downloaded at https://belligerator.cz/downloads/ (news-<version>.apk). It is available for Android only.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

For running the backend locally, you will need the following:

• NodeJS (v18)
• NestJS (v10)
• MySQL (v5.7)
• Docker (v20) - not required, it was used for creating the image and running the demo from the server.

Installation

1. Clone the repo news-backend

   git clone git@github.com:Belligerator/news-backend.git

2. Install NPM packages

   npm install

3. Create a .env file in the root directory and fill in the required environment variables. You can refer to the .env.example file for the required variables.

4. Create database schema news in database. Migration scripts will create the tables in the next step.

5. Run the app

   npm run start

   The app should be running on http://localhost:3000/.

6. In the root directory, there is a news.postman_collection.json file that contains a Postman collection with sample requests. You can import it into Postman and use it to test the endpoints.

Documentation

Documentation for the endpoints can be found at https://news.belligerator.cz/api/swagger.

Documentation for the backend can be found at https://news.belligerator.cz/api/documentation.