Hackathon Starter

Generate an Express + TypeScript project and deploy it to an EC2 instance via GitHub Actions.

Usage

./hackathonstarter <user/repo> <key> <ec2ip>

Instruction

1. Create a GitHub repository
2. Create an AWS account
3. Spawn an EC2 instance (Amazon Linux t2.micro, 443 and 80 ports open)

4. ./hackathonstarter noway/coolhackapi ~/Downloads/coolhack2021.pem 3.25.152.175

Example output

...
[PM2] Spawning PM2 daemon with pm2_home=/home/ec2-user/.pm2
[PM2] PM2 Successfully daemonized
[PM2] Starting /bin/yarn in fork_mode (1 instance)
[PM2] Done.
┌─────┬──────────────┬─────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬──────────┬────────┬──────┬───────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┐
│ id  │ name         │ namespace   │ version │ mode    │ pid      │ uptime │ ↺    │ status    │ cpu      │ mem      │ user     │ watching │
├─────┼──────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼──────────┼────────┼──────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┤
│ 0   │ coolhackapi  │ default     │ N/A     │ fork    │ 3623     │ 0s     │ 0    │ online    │ 0%       │ 2.7mb    │ ec2-user │ disabled │
└─────┴──────────────┴─────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴──────────┴────────┴──────┴───────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┘
https://ec2-3-25-152-175.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com
https://github.com/noway/coolhackapi
+ echo https://ec2-3-25-152-175.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com
+ echo https://github.com/noway/coolhackapi

Example repo

https://github.com/noway/thisprimedoesnotexist

Philosophy

This is an opinionated starter that aims to remove repetitive tasks required to ship a functional demo to the audience and the judges during a hackathon.

Hackathon Starter only generates the backend. For the frontend, CRA + Netlify works well and is free.

Included

• Yarn V1
• TypeScript
• Express
• ESLint
• CORS
• Logging
• VS Code settings
• CI/CD via GitHub Actions (SSH to an EC2 instance)
• HTTPS using Caddy

Justifications

• TypeScript is used because it is the lingua franca of modern development and type checking helps engineers communicate.
• Yarn is used because it is the default package manager for another great hackathon boilerplate - CRA.
• EC2 is used because AWS provides a running server for a year.
• Serverless (Lambda, Vercel, etc) is not used because it doesn't allow you to have server state or handle WebScokets.

Not included, but easily added

• Database (prefer stateless, otherwise globals, SQLite or RDS)
• Authentication (don't productionize a functional demo)
• Payments (don't productionize a functional demo)
• Next.js (you don't need SSR for a functional demo)

System requirements

Make sure following are installed on your system: npx, yarn, git and jq.