Keep Swimming Foundation

Keep Swimming Foundation (KSF) is a nonprofit organization that provides financial relief to families of critically ill patients who require extended inpatient medical care at an accredited USA hospital. Life can change in an instant. All too often families find themselves faced with unexpected medical bills after the diagnosis of a life-threatening or life-changing event. While health insurance provides support for medical costs, families faced with extended inpatient care typically shoulder the burden of the external costs associated with visiting and caring for their loved one. Because of this need, Keep Swimming Foundation was born. KSF uses a grant nomination process to determine who receives financial relief.

Objective of the Project

Create a command center for receiving and managing the grant nomination process that will significantly reduce the manual effort required (35 hours/week down to 2 hours/week). Improve, automate, and centralize communication with the Healthcare Professionals and the Family Members to keep them informed of the process and cut down on one-off communications.

What Technologies Are We Using?

The back end application is using the PERN Stack (Postgres, Express React, Node). The back end application is using Express Framework. The frontend application is using the React framework and several other third party libraries, bootstrapped via the create-react-app tool. Postgres is the database for the application.

Getting Started

In order to work with the KSF app, you will need to install the following:

NodeJS
PostgreSQL

Installing NodeJS

Install a version of NodeJS that starts with 14.16 (e.g. 14.16.0).

You should be able to find installation instructions for your particular platform here:

https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/

Installing Postgress

Postgres is our database. You will need to have Postgres installed on your computer to persist data and run the application.

If you do not have Postgres installed, you can install it via brew

In your command-line run the command: brew install postgresql
Run the command: ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/postgresql/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

Create two new aliases to start and stop your postgres server. They could look something like this:

alias pg_start="launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist"
alias pg_stop="launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist"

Run the alias you just created: pg_start. Use this comment to start your database service.
- alternatively, pg_stop stops your database service.
Run the command: createdb postgres
createuser -s postgres - fixes role "postgres" does not exist
Connect to your postgres with the command: psql

Test with psql command (and some additional commands if issues)

$ psql
psql (10.0)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# ALTER ROLE postgres WITH SUPERUSER;
postgres=# ALTER ROLE postgres WITH LOGIN;
postgres=# ALTER ROLE postgres WITH PASSWORD 'postgres';

Migrations, Dependencies & Start Back End

You should still be in the root of the project. We will start the back end first. So lets head to the back end directory

  cd packages
  cd api
  npm install

Sequelize is the ORM. This is the preferred way of communicating with the database, so the tools provided should be leveraged to help you build models and schema migrations. In particular, creation of new models should use the Sequelize CLI, which will create both a model file and a migration file. Quick overview of commands

The models and migrations folders will both need to be reviewed and updated to reflect the name sake standard of app. See naming convention docs

Let's run the migration to set up our database.

To run migration you must be in the api folder, and execute the following command.

npx sequelize-cli db:migrate

If you check your postgres database you should see the tables intergrated!

Now we can go ahead and start he application with the following command:

  node index.js

You can also run nodemon, which is a tool that helps develop node.js based applications by automatically restarting the node application when file changes in the directory are detected. To do so run the command below instead of node index.js.

  npm run dev

Start Front End

We will now start the frontend. Open up a new tab in the terminal and execute the following commands.

  cd ..
  cd app
  npm install
  npm start

If you navigate to http://localhost:3000/ you should see the home page!

Set Up Environment Variables

Set Up Environment Variables with DotENV Package DotENV

  cd packages
  cd api
  touch .env

Add your OAuth tokens, SSH keys, API credentials, and other secrets here they will be ignored by git.

Usage

Continuous Integration (CI)

Github Actions is the CI provider. Node.js workflow configuration documentation found here

Working With Email Previews

In order for your images to properly work in local and production stages, including email previews, you must add both of these lines to your api/.env file: IMG_BASE_URL=https://ksf-stg.herokuapp.com and APP_URL=http://localhost:3000. This allows for a check to take place to determine which environment the mailer is running in.

the-difference-engine / ksf

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