paypal-converter

A UI to show your balance in paypal converted to multicaja.cl

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About what the app does

This is a small project dedicated for remote workers, especially for those who work from Chile, but the idea can be applied anywhere. It uses a currency exchange API to calculate how much the money you get paid is worth in your local currency (only CLP for now), taking into account the fees usually associated with currency exchanges services. In the case of Chile, a popular service is Multicaja.cl

TODO

Add more currency options and look into other exchange services

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the paypal-converter repository and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the paypal-converter repository. You can get git from here.

We also use a number of Node.js tools to initialize paypal-converter. You must have Node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from here.

Clone paypal-converter

Clone the paypal-converter repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/kkhenriquez/paypal-converter.git
cd paypal-converter

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and Angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

• We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the Node package manager.
• We get the Angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. After that, you should find out that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/components - contains the Angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but angular-seed changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a web server.

Run the Application

We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:

npm start

Now browse to the app at localhost:8000/index.html.

Online version can be found here.

Serving the Application Files

While Angular is client-side-only technology and it is possible to create Angular web apps that do not require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local web server during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, XHR, etc to function properly when an HTML page is opened via the file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The paypal-converter project comes preconfigured with a local development web server. It is a Node.js tool called http-server. You can start this web server with npm start, but you may choose to install the tool globally:

sudo npm install -g http-server

Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:

http-server -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own web server, such as Apache or Nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.

Running the App in Production

This really depends on how complex your app is and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are the files under the app/ directory. Everything else should be omitted.

Angular apps are really just a bunch of static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.

If your Angular app is talking to the backend server via XHR or other means, you need to figure out what is the best way to host the static files to comply with the same origin policy if applicable. Usually this is done by hosting the files by the backend server or through reverse-proxying the backend server(s) and web server(s).

Continuous Integration

Travis CI

Travis CI is a continuous integration service, which can monitor GitHub for new commits to your repository and execute scripts such as building the app or running tests. The angular-seed project contains a Travis configuration file, .travis.yml, which will cause Travis to run your tests when you push to GitHub.

You will need to enable the integration between Travis and GitHub. See the Travis website for instructions on how to do this.

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out angularjs.org.