🚀 DevTinder – Backend API

DevTinder is a backend platform built using Node.js, Express, and MongoDB, designed to help developers connect, collaborate, and interact securely. This project focuses on real-world backend engineering concepts such as authentication, authorization, schema-level validations, and secure API design.

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✨ Key Highlights

• Secure authentication using JWT + HTTP-only cookies
• Password encryption using bcrypt
• Strong schema-level validations with Mongoose + validator
• Clean separation of concerns (models, middleware, utils)
• Production-style backend practices

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🚀 Features

• User Registration (Signup)
• User Login with JWT authentication
• Protected routes using auth middleware
• Full CRUD operations on users
• MongoDB + Mongoose schema validations
• Email, name, password, gender & URL validation
• Secure password storage (bcrypt hashing)
• Schema methods for JWT creation & password verification
• Allowed-fields based secure update system
• Environment variable support using dotenv
• Development auto-reload using nodemon

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🛠 Tech Stack

Technology	Purpose
Node.js	JavaScript runtime
Express.js	REST API framework
MongoDB	NoSQL database
Mongoose	ODM for MongoDB
JWT	Authentication & authorization
bcrypt	Password hashing & verification
validator	Email, password & URL validation
dotenv	Environment variable management
nodemon	Development auto-reload

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📁 Folder Structure

devTinder/
│
├── src/
│   ├── config/
│   │   └── database.js
│   ├── middlewares/
│   │   └── auth.js
│   ├── models/
│   │   └── user.js
│   ├── utils/
│   │   └── validation.js
│   └── app.js
│
├── .env
├── .gitignore
├── package.json
├── README.md

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⚙️ Installation & Setup

1️⃣ Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ankit369248/devTinder.git
cd devTinder

2️⃣ Install dependencies

npm install

3️⃣ Configure environment variables

Create a .env file in the root directory:

PORT=7777
MONGO_URI=your_mongodb_connection_string
JWT_SECRET=your_secret_key

4️⃣ Start the server

Development mode (with auto-reload):

npm run dev

Production mode:

npm start

Server will run on:

http://localhost:7777

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📡 API Endpoints

🔐 Authentication

• POST /signup → Register a new user
• POST /login → Login user & issue JWT (cookie-based)
• GET /profile → Get logged-in user profile (protected)

👥 User APIs

• GET /feed → Fetch all users
• GET /userOne/:emailId → Get user by email
• PATCH /user/:userId → Update user by ID
• DELETE /user → Delete user by email

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🔍 Validations Implemented

• First & Last Name → Alphabets only
• Email → Validated using validator.isEmail()
• Password → Strong password validation
• Password Storage → Hashed using bcrypt
• Photo URL → Must be a valid URL
• Gender → male | female | others
• Skills → Maximum 10 skills allowed
• Email → Auto-trimmed & lowercased
• Timestamps → Automatically maintained

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🔐 Authentication Flow

1. User logs in with email & password
2. Password verified using bcrypt
3. JWT generated using schema method
4. JWT stored in HTTP-only cookie
5. Protected routes validated via auth middleware
6. Logged-in user context attached to request

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🔮 Future Enhancements

• Logout API
• Refresh token mechanism
• Role-based access control (Admin/User)
• Pagination & sorting in /feed
• Request validation using Joi / Zod
• Profile image upload
• React frontend integration

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions, suggestions, and improvements are welcome. Feel free to fork the repository and raise a PR.

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📜 License

ISC License