Peerdea

Peerdea is a trusted environment for entrepreneurs to reflect and receive peer feedback. It provides entrepreneurs social support for their business and professional development.

Table of Contents

1. Peerdea workflow
2. Installation
   1. Installing Necessary Packages
   2. Setting up the environment
   3. Hosting Peerdea on cloud server
   4. Setting up your environment
   5. Troubleshooting
3. Available Scripts
4. Tools used
5. Updates for deprecated packages (as of 07/02/2021)
6. Contributors

Peerdea workflow

1. Once a user creates an account, they will be prompted to create a new group or join an existing group.
2. Once the user creates or joins a group, they are then guided to share a design concept.
   1. If they choose to share, they can include a series of images to capture their concept (photos of sketches, prototypes, completed designs), as well aas a short story to describe their concept.
   2. Whether they share a concept or not, the user is able to view all of the concepts shared within their group, as well as give feedback on their peers' concepts.
3. Feedback exchange is possible in two ways:
   1. a simple "Yes" or "Heart" to show quick encouragement on a peer's concept, or
   2. a "Yes and..." where in addition to showing encouragement, the feedback giver is able to offer text-based feedback (the "and..." portion).
      1. Text-based feedback exchanges are scaffolded with two different sentence starters ("I like..." and "I wish..."). All completed "ands..." are then displayed following each concept.

Installation

For a more comprehensive guide for Windows/Android, please check here. Otherwise, continue for a guide that covers a lot of Mac/Windows.

Installing Necessary Packages

Windows Prerequisites

For Windows, before doing anything, you want to make sure Windows Subsystem for Linux is installed. A guide for doing so can be found here.

Mac Prerequisites

For Mac, you will need to run this within a terminal:

xcode-select --install

You can verify if it succeeded by running xcode-select -p and have it return a file path. It will install a package around 1.2GB in size.

Alternatively, you can download brew, a package management system that is often used for Mac:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

To check installation, you can run brew doctor.

For Expo to run, you will also need to install watchman. With brew installed, this is pretty simple; all you need to do is run brew install watchman.

Packages needed for both

For both, you will want to make sure you have a few packages already installed:

• Node Version Manager or plain Node
  • Generally speaking, downloading the LTS version of Node.js should work fine, but using NVM helps with backward compatibility.
  • For NVM on Mac, you may need to run touch ~/.zshrc before running the install script in order to use the script in the future. See their Troubleshooting on Mac section for more information
• Git

On your phone, you will want to install the Expo Go app in order to test the app on your mobile device.

• For Android, download from this link
• For iOS, download from here

After, you should have everything you need to start setting up your environment

Setting up the environment

First, you will want to download the repo, which can be done using:

git clone https://github.com/ykotturi/peerdea.git

and then use cd peerdea to change to the directory.

After, you will:

1. Run npm install --global expo-cli to install Expo as necessary
2. Run npm install in the root directory (/peerdea/)
3. cd peerdea-native and run npm install
4. cd .. (to return to the previous directory), cd backend and run npm install again.

You can test the app by running:

npm start

in the root directory. While running this, make sure your phone and your laptop are on the same network, and you're not using any VPNs (especially if you're using LAN in developer tools). You will want to open up a QR scanner, and then use that to open the Expo app. It should start loading.

Hosting Peerdea on cloud server

To host Peerdea on a cloud server, we used Azure via Docker.

Here are a few helpful links to help you get started:

1. https://docs.docker.com/compose/
2. https://docs.docker.com/compose/gettingstarted/
3. https://docs.docker.com/cloud/aci-integration/

Setting up your environment variables

Right now, the way to set up a testing environment is a bit of a manual process.

1. In backend\server.js, change the API_PORT from 80 to 8000 in order to test locally.
2. You will need to set up 2 .env files for your environment variables:
   1. In peerdea-native, set up a .env file with the variables:
      1. DOCKER_URL: To do so, you can run ipconfig getifaddr en1 in your terminal. Get that IP address, and add it to the file with the port so that it looks something like: 127.0.0.1:8000
   2. In backend, set up a .env file with the variables:
      1. DB_ROUTE: You can install MongoDB. Note that on Mac you can use brew to do so. After, you can use your own connection string for this variable.
      2. DOCKER_HOST: This variable is the IP address of your Azure instance.

Troublshooting

When launching Peerdea from a new isntallation, you may get an error that goes something like Unable to resolve module ./zlib_bindings from /Users/yasminekotturi/Documents/peerdea/peerdea-native/node_modules/zlib/lib/zlib.. To fix this you will want to comment out the entire file in peerdea/peerdea-native/node_modules/zlib/libzlib.js.

If nothing opens when you try to open the app, you may need to update Expo (as of 03/18, master branch is running Expo 40). To update, you will first want to be in the /peerdea/peerdea-native directory. From there, run expo install VERSION_NUMBER. Currently, versions 43 or 44 advised. Expo also strongly recommends you upgrade incrementally (i.e. upgrade to 41, then 42, etc.)

More to be added as issues come up

Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start to start the application

npm test to run backend testing

npm install to install necessary dependencies

Tools used

• React Native via Expo
• Mocha
• Travis CI
• Express
• MongoDB
• Mongoose
• Azure
• GraphQL

Updates for deprecated packages (as of 07/02/2021)

The back end was slightly updated to select an option for a deprecated feature of Mongoose.

With this build, there will be two main errors on the front end:

1. [Unhandled promise rejection: Error: The Expo push notification service is supported only for Expo projects...]
2. currentlyFocusedField is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use currentlyFocusedInput

To fix the first one, you'll have to create an expo account here, use expo login, and login with your account info.

For the second one, you'll have to navigate to peerdea-native/node_modules/@react-navigation/native/src/createKeyboardAwareNavigator.js and change all functions that are currentlyFocusedField() to currentlyFocusedInput().

Contributors

Peerdea's current team of contributors: Harvey Zheng, Clara Lam, Emmaline Mai, Pranav Khadpe, Jenny Yu, led by Yasmine Kotturi (Ph.D. Human-Computer Interaction).