Chatopia

THIS IS AN OPTIONAL README FILE

This is for personal reference and also guide for others as to how I approached to make this app

Overview

Welcome to the Chat App – a project designed for myself to learn the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js). This application serves as a practical learning experience, allowing me to delve into the world of real-time chat applications while mastering the core technologies of the MERN stack.

Development Notes

• First I started with backend creating my backend server in an index.js file.
  • You’ve created an Express application.
  • Utilized the cors middleware to handle Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.
  • Loaded environment variables from a .env file using dotenv.
  • Defined routes for the root endpoint (‘/’), returning a simple greeting.
  • Defined a route for ‘/api/chats’ to send the entire chats data.
  • Defined a route for ‘/api/chats/:id’ to send a single chat based on the provided id.

    We will come back to this later to add more stuff.

• Next I created frontend foleder and initialzed a React Project in it.
  • We wrote some basic code to check if everything is working fine.
  • Next we added router to our project in main.jsx file. This helped us to navigate between different pages. And we only had to define logic for routing in one place at main.jsx
• We Created Schemas for our databse in models folder.
  • Three separate models (Chat, Message, and User) are defined, each with its own schema and functionality.
    • User model Represents individual users in the system. Captures essential user information such as name, email, password, and profile picture. Provides a foundation for authentication and authorization in the application.
    • Chat model Represents a chat or conversation in the system. Supports both one-on-one and group chats (isGroupChat property). Keeps track of participants (users array), the latest message (latestMessage reference), and the admin user in group chats (groupAdmin reference).
    • Message model Represents individual messages exchanged within a chat. Associates each message with a sender (sender reference) and the chat it belongs to (chat reference). Facilitates tracking of message content and creation times.
  • The models are organized into separate files and exported for use in other parts of the application.
  • Relationships between models are established using Mongoose’s ref property, allowing for easy population of related data.
  • Timestamps are automatically managed for each model, recording the creation and update times.
• Added User Authentication
  • Added user Routes, Registration API, JSON WebTOKEN (JWT)
  • Added password API and password encryption with bcrypt

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