LernFair Backend

• GraphQL Guidelines
• The Notification System
• Writing Integration Tests
• How-to migrate db with TypeORM
• Administration stuff / business logic

The backend exposes various APIs to other services and runs various background jobs on top of a PostgreSQL database. It is deployed in two Heroku Dynos, one answering API requests and one running jobs.

                                       +-[ Backend Web Dyno ]-----------------------------------------------------------+
web-user-app      ----[ REST    ]----> | (Express) /web/controllers                                                     |
                                       |                                                  (TypeORM) /common/entity/*    |
backend-screening ----[ REST    ]----> | (Express) /web/controllers/screeningController   (Prisma)  /prisma/*           | ----- SQL ----> PostgreSQL 
                                       |                                                                                |
   ReTool         ----[ GraphQL ]----> | (Apollo)  /graphql                             (Mailjet) /common/mails/*       | ----- REST ----> Mailjet        
                                       |                                                (Mailjet) /common/notification/*|
                                       +-[ Backend Job Dyno ]--------------------                                       +
                                       |  /jobs                                                                         |
                                       +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Build & Run

To run the backend, compile it first using npm run build. Make sure to have all dependencies installed before building by using npm ci. You also need to set your environment accordingly (for further details see .env.example) and set up a local database server.

To run the development configuration of the web server handling the API requests run npm run web:dev. The development version of the jobs can be run using npm run jobs:dev.

The /assets folder contains development versions of various files. During Heroku builds, the folder is replaced by a secret version that is maintained in a separate private repository. The commit id of the version pulled is stored in .certificate-version.

Command line arguments

The following command line arguments are available:

Argument	Description
--noPDF	Skips Puppeteer and PDF initialization, which is handy for speeding up development

Docs

For building the API Docs you need apidoc in your PATH. If you use the reference from the development dependencies, you will probably have to add node_modules/.bin manually to your PATH. If you don't mind you can also install it globally using npm install -g apidoc. The build process is initiated using npm run web:docs and outputs the static html to web/public/docs. You can either open the index.html manually or start the web server for serving.

Contributing

We're always happy and open about contributions, please contact the HR team in case you are interested in joining our team of volunteers.

Security Issues

We follow the guidelines for responsible disclosure: If you find a vulnerability, we would encourage you to contact Support and gives us some time to tackle the issues, before publishing it. We take security very seriously and these issues are automatically highest priority for us.

Since we are a non-profit organization with not much of a budget, we can't offer a bug bounty program. Currently we can only offer you to be mentioned in our contributor list and the feeling to have successfully supported a non-profit open-source project.