Friendivia

An online party game where participants have to answer questions about themselves, and then try to guess their friends' answers to the same questions.

Gameplay

Check out the experience page for more information about how the game is played.

Development Setup

This repository is a monorepo, meaning that it contains multiple software projects. In this case, there is both a front-end and a back-end. In order to run the entire application, it will be necessary to run both the front-end and the back-end projects.

The Back-End

The back-end project is a Node.js project.

Setting Up the Environment Variables

In order for the application to work, it needs to connect to a database, and properly handle requests from the front-end. There are some configuration settings that make this possible, through environment variables. These make the project much more dynamic; it is possible to swap out one database for another, or update deployments without changing any code.

Create a new file named .env in the back-end folder with these contents:

MONGO_URI="<SECRET>"
DB_NAME="friendivia-test"
FRONT_END_URL="http://localhost:3000"

Replace the <SECRET> part with an actual database URI.

Running the Server

The next step is to run the server. Start by opening up a terminal from the base folder.

Run this command to change the directory to the back-end folder:

cd back-end

There, install all necessary packages using npm:

npm install

Finally, run the server with the following command:

npm run start

The output should hopefully end up looking something like this:

$ npm run start

> friendivia-back-end@1.0.0 start
> nodemon --exec ts-node-esm index.ts

[nodemon] 2.0.22
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching path(s): *.*
[nodemon] watching extensions: ts,json
[nodemon] starting `ts-node-esm index.ts`
Server listening on 4001
MongoDB successfully connected

The Front-End

Running things on the front-end side will be very similar to the back-end. It is a React project.

Setting Up the Environment Variables

Like the back-end, the front-end has some necessary configuration settings. These will also be set with environment variables.

Create a new file named .env in the front-end folder with these contents:

HTTP_PROXY="http://localhost:4001"
HTTPS_PROXY="http://localhost:4001"
REACT_APP_BACK_END_URL="http://localhost:4001"

Running the Front-End Server

Now, the front-end server is ready to run! Open another new terminal from the base folder.

Run this command to change the directory to the front-end folder:

cd front-end

There, install all necessary packages using npm:

npm install

Finally, run the front-end scripts with the following command:

npm run start

After a while, the output should hopefully end up looking something like this:

Compiled successfully!

You can now view friendivia-front-end in the browser.

  Local:            http://localhost:3000/
  On Your Network:  http://10.10.21.235:3000/

Note that the development build is not optimized.
To create a production build, use npm run build.

Testing

Once both the front-end and the back-end projects are up and running, visit the front-end page to test out the application.