contacts-app

Contacts App

A web-app to to store contacts. Online Demo

Architecture

This app is comprised of a front-end server-side rendered single-page application built with Vue.js and a REST API written in Node.js, using Hapi.js as framework and PostgreSQL as database.

Front-end

The front-end, built with Vue.js, is component based. The server-side rendering was derived from vinicius0026/hapi-vue-ssr. Although this is a little overkill for this app, server-side rendering is crucial for reducing time-to-content in single-page applications.

The entry points to server and browser environments are, respectively, app/entry-client.js and app/entry-server.js. The root app is setup on app/App.vue.

Even though there is only the main route in the app, vue-router is used to load the data when the app is rendered on server-side. The HomeView.vue component, under app/pages directory, is mounted on the main route directory.

The remaining components are located under app/components.

vuex is used to manage application state. As this app is rather simple, vuex modules where not used so all global state related code is under app/store/index.js.

All requests to the API are done via service singletons, that lie in app/services. As there is only one resource to this app, only one service was created, contacts.js.

Stylus is used as CSS Preprocessor.

The app is bundled with webpack. All webpack related configuration is under build folder.

Vuetify Material Component Framework was used for most app's layout. The design was inspired by macOs Contacts app and by Google Contacts app.

Back-end

The back-end is a REST API built in Node.js with Hapi.js and PostgreSQL.

Code is organized using Hapi.js plugins. General purpose plugins are located under server/plugins and API plugins are under server/api.

For each resource on the API there is a folder under server/api containing the following files:

• index.js Plugin declaration file. The routes are registered on this file.
• handlers.js Handlers file. All handlers for the routes declared on index.js are located on this file
• model.js The resource model. All database operations go through this file
• schema.js A schema declaration file, using Joi, used on route validation

Objection ORM is used for simplifying database queries. All model classes extend server/util/BaseModel.js class, which in turn extends the Objection Model class, adding some niceties such as automatic conversion between camelCase and snake_case and automatic timestamping operations like insert and update.

knex is the query builder used by Objection and it is also used to run database migrations. Migration files are stored under migrations directory on the project root.

Other relevant modules are:

• Boom for error handling
• Confidence for storing environment-based configuration. Configuration lies in server/config.js file.
• Glue for composing all server plugins

API Documentation

API documentation is automatically generated based on routes declaration. hapi-swagger is used to achieve this.

The docs are available online here

Running

Make sure you have Node.js (version >= 8.9) installed and PostgreSQL installed and running.

• Clone this repo.

• Create two databases, without password:

  • contacts_app_test for testing environment
  • contacts_app_dev for development

• Install dependencies:

npm install

• Run migrations

npm run knex migrate:latest

• Start app in development mode:

npm run dev

Testing

Tests are included for all the API endpoints. Make sure you have setup the test database and run:

npm run test

Deploy

The online demo is deployed to heroku. You can follow their documentation to deploy another version of this app.

Analyzing bundle

Bundle can be analyzed using the command npm run analyze. This will build the application in production mode and will create an interactive treemap visualization of the contents of the bundles. webpack-bundle-analyzer is used for generating the analysis. This can be useful for optimizing bundle size.

Code style

Standard style is used on javascript files.

For Vue.js files, the official Vue Style Guide is followed to the maximum extent. The rules are enforced via eslint-plugin-vue module.

Code style can be verified by running:

npm run lint

Contributing

Feel free to open PRs to this module. Make sure you adhere to code style and that you add/correct API tests, if needed.

LICENSE

This app is MIT Licensed. See the LICENSE file for details.