DevConnector 2.0

Social network for developers

This is a MERN stack application from the "MERN Stack Front To Back" course on Udemy. It is a small social network app that includes authentication, profiles and forum posts.

Updates since course published

Such is the nature of software; things change frequently, newer more robust paradigms emerge and packages are continuously evolving. Hopefully the below will help you adjust your course code to manage the most notable changes.

The master branch of this repository contains all the changes and updates, so if you're following along with the lectures in the Udemy course and need reference code to compare against please checkout the origionalcoursecode branch. Much of the code in this master branch is compatible with course code but be aware that if you adopt some of the changes here, it may require other changes too.

After completing the course you may want to look through this branch and play about with the changes.

Changes to GitHub API authentication

Since the course was published, GitHub has depreciated authentication via URL query parameters You can get an access token by following these instructions For this app we don't need to add any permissions so don't select any in the scopes. DO NOT SHARE ANY TOKENS THAT HAVE PERMISSIONS This would leave your account or repositories vulnerable, depending on permissions set.

It would also be worth adding your default.json config file to .gitignore If git has been previously tracking your default.json file then...

git rm --cached config/default.json

Then add your token to the config file and confirm that the file is untracked with git status before pushing to GitHub. GitHub does have your back here though. If you accidentally push code to a repository that contains a valid access token, GitHub will revoke that token. Thanks GitHub 🙏

You'll also need to change the options object in routes/api/profile.js where we make the request to the GitHub API to...

const options = {
  uri: encodeURI(
    `https://api.github.com/users/${req.params.username}/repos?per_page=5&sort=created:asc`
  ),
  method: 'GET',
  headers: {
    'user-agent': 'node.js',
    Authorization: `token ${config.get('githubToken')}`
  }
};

npm package request depreciated

As of 11th February 2020 request has been depreciated and is no longer maintained. We already use axios in the client so we can easily change the above fetching of a users GitHub repositories to use axios.

Install axios in the root of the project

npm i axios

We can then remove the client installation of axios.

cd client
npm uninstall axios

Client use of the axios module will be resolved in the root, so we can still use it in client.

Change the above GitHub API request to..

const uri = encodeURI(
  `https://api.github.com/users/${req.params.username}/repos?per_page=5&sort=created:asc`
);
const headers = {
  'user-agent': 'node.js',
  Authorization: `token ${config.get('githubToken')}`
};

const gitHubResponse = await axios.get(uri, { headers });

You can see the full change in routes/api/profile.js

uuid no longer has a default export

The npm package uuid no longer has a default export, so in our client/src/actions/alert.js we need to change the import and use of this package.

change

import uuid from 'uuid';

to

import { v4 as uuidv4 } from 'uuid';

And where we use it from

const id = uuid();

to

const id = uuidv4();

Addition of normalize-url package 🌎

Depending on what a user enters as their website or social links, we may not get a valid clickable url. For example a user may enter traversymedia.com or www.traversymedia.com which won't be a clickable valid url in the UI on the users profile page. To solve this we brought in normalize-url to well.. normalize the url.

Regardless of what the user enters it will ammend the url accordingly to make it valid (assuming the site exists). You can see the use here in routes/api/profile.js

Fix broken links in gravatar 🔗

There is an unresolved issue with the node-gravatar package, whereby the url is not valid. Fortunately we added normalize-url so we can use that to easily fix the issue. If you're not seeing Gravatar avatars showing in your app then most likely you need to implement this change. You can see the code use here in routes/api/users.js

Redux subscription to manage local storage 📥

The rules of redux say that our reducers should be pure and do just one thing.

If you're not familiar with the concept of pure functions, they must do the following..

1. Return the same output given the same input.
2. Have no side effects.

So our reducers are not the best place to manage local storage of our auth token. Ideally our action creators should also just dispatch actions, nothing else. So using these for additional side effects like setting authentication headers is not the best solution here.

Redux provides us with a store.subscribe listener that runs every time a state change occurs.

We can use this listener to watch our store and set our auth token in local storage and axios headers accordingly.

• if there is a token - store it in local storage and set the headers.
• if there is no token - token is null - remove it from storage and delete the headers.

The subscription can be seen in client/src/store.js

We also need to change our client/src/utils/setAuthToken.js so it now handles both the setting of the token in local storage and in axios headers.

With those two changes in place we can remove all setting of local storage from client/src/reducers/auth.js. And remove setting of the token in axios headers from client/src/actions/auth.js. This helps keep our code predictable, manageable and ultimately bug free.

Component reuse ♻️

The EditProfile and CreateProfile have been reduced to one component ProfileForm.js
The majority of this logic came from the refactrored EditProfile Component.

Log user out on token expiration 🔐

If the Json Web Token expires then it should log the user out and end the authentication of their session.

We can do this using a axios interceptor together paired with creating an instance of axios.
The interceptor, well... intercepts any response and checks the response from our api for a 'Token is not valid' message.
ie. the token has now expired and is no longer valid.
If such a message exists then we log out the user and clear the profile from redux state.

You can see the implementation of the interceptor and axios instance in utils/api.js

Creating an instance of axios also cleans up our action creators in actions/auth.js, actions/profile.js and actions/post.js

---

Quick Start 🚀

Add a default.json file in config folder with the following

{
  "mongoURI": "<your_mongoDB_Atlas_uri_with_credentials>",
  "jwtSecret": "secret",
  "githubToken": "<yoursecrectaccesstoken>"
}

Install server dependencies

npm install

Install client dependencies

cd client
npm install

Run both Express & React from root

npm run dev

Build for production

cd client
npm run build

Test production before deploy

After running a build in the client 👆, cd into the root of the project.
And run...

NODE_ENV=production node server.js

Check in browser on http://localhost:5000/

Deploy to Heroku

If you followed the sensible advice above and included config/default.json and config/production.json in your .gitignore file, then pushing to Heroku will omit your config files from the push.
However, Heroku needs these files for a successful build.
So how to get them to Heroku without commiting them to GitHub?

What I suggest you do is create a local only branch, lets call it production.

git checkout -b production

We can use this branch to deploy from, with our config files.

Add the config file...

git add -f config/production.json

This will track the file in git on this branch only. DON'T PUSH THE PRODUCTION BRANCH TO GITHUB

Commit...

git commit -m 'ready to deploy'

Create your Heroku project

heroku create

And push the local production branch to the remote heroku master branch.

git push heroku production:master

Now Heroku will have the config it needs to build the project.

Don't forget to make sure your production database is not whitelisted in MongoDB Atlas, otherwise the database connection will fail and your app will crash.

After deployment you can delete the production branch if you like.

git checkout master
git branch -D production

Or you can leave it to merge and push updates from another branch.
Make any changes you need on your master branch and merge those into your production branch.

git checkout production
git merge master

Once merged you can push to heroku as above and your site will rebuild and be updated.

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App Info

Author

Brad Traversy Traversy Media

Version

2.0.0

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License