Nekretnine

Real estate listing site, the main features are search and results pages that query a MariaDB database in the backend and show each row result on the frontend using ejs, a html templating engine. Each real estate object has it's own page from which they can be ordered. The project uses the Express web framework for routing

The search page, showing only the available type of real estate object

results page

There is an admin part where real estate objects can be configured alongside the locations and types of real estate objects

TODO:

• Make nekretnine company agnostic, with assets configurable in the admin panel
• Add possibility to use docker (https://hub.docker.com/r/darthsim/imgproxy) / node.js (https://github.com/lovell/sharp) microservice for resizing images into thumbnail versions
• Improve page number logic on the search results pages
• Refactor backend code to make better use of async / await
• Make sure the English translation is complete (including switching database to English)
• Improve and refactor form search options to better categorize real estate objects from multiple areas
• Finish separating main pages and admin CSS

Installation instructions

Modify the .env file for the environment in use

This project uses the dotenv middleware to add key/value pairs from the .env file into the project as environment variables, the default values are

Environment variables

NODE_ENV = "production"

Default production value, you may change it to development for debugging

DB_HOST = "db"

Should be set to the address of the database

DB_USER = "testuser123"

Should be set to the user who has control over the database

DB_PASS = "testpass123"

The password of the user who has control over the database

DB_DB = "nekretnine"

The name of the database itself

DB_PORT = "3306"

The port of the database

COOKIE_SECRET = "testcookie123"

Should be a random string, for cookie authentificaiton

WEB_PASS = "testpass123"

The password to the admin part of the site, should be strong (minimum 8 characters consiting of at least 1 uppercase and lowercase letter, 1 number and 1 special character)

WEB_PORT = "8000"

The port the website will listen on

Install the app

At this point you have the option to use Docker or to manually install the app

Docker instructions

Docker can be found on the official site: https://www.docker.com

Running docker compose --env-file ../.env up will build the Dockerfile in the root directory and start 2 containers, the nodejs site and a MariaDB database, populated with some sample data

Alternatively, if you configured the .env file with another database you can skip using docker compose and run just the nodejs container like this:

docker build -t nekretnine:latest .
docker run --name nekretnine -d --restart unless-stopped -p 8000:8000 nekretnine:latest

Manual instructions

These commands should be run inside the root folder of the project, i'm assuming you'll be running them on Linux but they can easily be modified for Windows

Install nodejs and the dependencies for the app

Node.js can be found on the offical site: https://nodejs.org

With Node.js installed, running npm install will download and install all the needed dependencies

Import the database

The database in use by the project is MariaDB which is cross compatible with MySQL, first the database for app should be created:

mysql -u root -p -e "CREATE DATABASE nekretnine"

Then the schema should be imported into the created database

mysql -u root -p nekretnine < nekretnine.sql

There is dummy data available in the repository with locations for the Niš, Serbia area. It can be imported like this:

mysql -u root -p nekretnine < data.sql

All of these commands will prompt for the password of the root user

Running the app

The app can be started with a shell script that will automatically start the app and restart it should it crash

cd src && sh app.sh

alternatively, the app.js file can be ran directly directly with npm

npm start

Visiting the website

After starting the app, the website can be visited on the following address: http://localhost:8000

Logging using the morgan middleware can be achieved with setting the logging environment variable to 1 like logging=1 node app.js, the format of the logs can be configured, more info can be found here: https://github.com/expressjs/morgan#predefined-formats

A log file rotator is also in use, the availble options are documented on the middleware page: https://www.npmjs.com/package/rotating-file-stream#options