Simple Stack Overflow Clone

Simple clone of Stackoverflow. Features implemented are:

• User signup

• User sign in (using JWT)

• Ask Question

• View Questions

• Upvote or downvote question

• Answer Question

• Search (Questions, Answers and Users)

• Subscribe user to question

Installation

This project requires Node.js v8+ to run.

Clone the project, Install the dependencies and devDependencies and start the server.

git clone https://github.com/Jake-parkers/mini-stack-overflow.git
cd mini-stack-overflow
npm install
npm start

For Production Environments

git clone https://github.com/Jake-parkers/mini-stack-overflow.git
cd mini-stack-overflow
npm install
NODE_ENV=production
npm start

Data Model

The data model used for this project is shown below

NOTES

This project assumes that a WYSIWYG editor is used to ask and answer questions. In particular, it assumes that quilljs is used as the editor. Hence all questions asked are saved in the form of a quill delta document. An example is shown below:

[
    { insert: 'The Two Towers' },
    { insert: '\n', attributes: { header: 1 } },
    { insert: 'Aragorn sped on up the hill.\n' }
]

The search implementation in this project was inspired by that of Stack Overflow.

It is assumed that the hypothetical frontend will be able to determine the search type based on whether a [tag], a user user:John Doe, a question question:Who is it or an answer:It's me is being searched for. And then pass the appropriate type and query to the search endpoint.

The assumptions made for search are:

• a user can search by a tag

• a user can search by question

• a user can search by answer

• a user can search for other users

Search by question and answer uses mongodb's $text with text indexes on title and excerpt fields.

The user search is done via mongodb's regular expressions and matches any part of a user's display name that has the query.