customer-to-customer

Introduction

Customer-to-customer (C2C) transactions rely on a third party to facilitate transactions between a buyer and a seller. Payments are handled online and the seller will be responsible for faciltating shipping. Some examples of C2C transaction sites are eBay, Etsy, and Craigslist.

Notes

• Reverted the ingress and skaffold version because expiration service was not connecting to NATS.
• In Docker Desktop, my resource configuration is:
  • CPUs: 4
  • Memory: 3.00 GB (Increasing this stopped an http client connection failure)
  • Swap: 1 GB

Prerequisites

Have the following installed:

• Node.js
• Docker Desktop
  • Make sure to enable Kubernetes
• NGINX Ingress Controller
  • Currently using the Docker Desktop steps. If you are using something different, you will have to look up the configuration.
• Skaffold

How to Setup

Add the following to your /etc/hosts/ file:

127.0.0.1 customertocustomer.dev

The following secrets need to be created to run the application. Follow the instructions below with your own values:

Create a jwt secret:

kubectl create secret generic jwt-secret --from-literal=JWT_KEY=<ENTER_VALUE_HERE>

Create a stripe secret: (You must have a stripe account. For development, make sure to be using the test key.)

kubectl create secret generic stripe-secret --from-literal=STRIPE_KEY=<ENTER_STRIPE_KEY>

In the client folder, create a .env.local file and fill in your publishable stripe key. It needs to be prefixed by NEXT_PUBLIC so that the browser can access it.

NEXT_PUBLIC_PUBLISHABLE_STRIPE_KEY=<YOUR_PUBLISHABLE_STRIPE_KEY>

How to Run

Once you have gone through the prerequisites and setup, you can run the application with:

skaffold dev

In case of any cleanup failures when stopping the application, try executing the following:

skaffold delete

Services

Auth

The auth service is responsible for creating user accounts, logging in, and getting the current logged in user.

Items

The items service is responsible for storing the created items by a user.

Orders

The orders service is responsible for storing orders from customers.

Expiration

The expiration service is responsible for expiring orders after a certain amount of time.

Payments

The payments service is responsible for handling payment transactions through Stripe.

Improvements

• Should implement some sort of database transaction in case of failure whenever adding or updating something from the database.
  • Mongoose has this, but requires may require a separate database for testing instead of the memory-server
• The minimal amount of data is being shared across services. If we want to future proof it, we would just send everything.
• Should implement user's own Stripe accounts using oauth.
  • A percentage can go to the app, and the rest goes to the user.
• UI Improvements:
  • Display if the user sold or bought the item
  • Have an amount info to sellers
  • Add images to items
• Put expired orders back up for sale