Alauda

Problem statement

Our user needs a way to have access to positive and inspiring content in the morning so that they don't have to search it themselves.

Our solution

Alauda is a Progressive Web App which, every day, present users with a selection of articles matching their interests, using the News API.

What is a PWA?

PWA are web applications that take advantage of new features supported by modern browsers, such as service workers and web app manifests, to appear to the user like native mobile applications. In this sense, PWA combine the best of the web and the best of apps.

From a music app to new(s) internet in a few pivots (the history of development)

• The original idea was to build a PWA alarm clock linked with the clock of one's mobile phone which would play different music or sounds every morning. However, we realised that PWA were not fit for purpose and changed the app idea.

• We then decided to build a PWA which would send to its users a push notification every morning containing music and pictures they might like. After exploring various music APIs we unfortunately had to abandon the idea. Heads up - we are still waiting for an API key from the Free Music Archive (it has been three weeks 😞).

• We then decided to use the News API and send users positive news they might be interested in. However, as we explored push notifications we realised that we didn't have time to include them in our sprint. The final MVP is a PWA where users can find articles that match their interests.

Screenshot

Who - our team

Name	Github	Twitter
Giulia - DevOps
Ivi - UX
Katia - Scrum Master
Parissa - QA

How to run the app locally

• Make sure you have MongoDB and Node JS set up on your local computer.
• Fork the repo and navigate to your local folder where you would like to store its local copy
• Clone the repo git clone [email protected]:fac-13/allauda.git
• Set up the API keys. This projects uses .env file where you should store YOUR News API key. You can get the API key here.
• Set up the path to your local database. An exmple of such path that should be in your .env file is DATABASE_URL=mongodb://localhost/alaudadb
• Create SECRET in your local .env file. It can be any word you choose.
• An example of .env file that should be in the root of your local project is below:

DATABASE_URL=mongodb://localhost/alaudadb
SECRET=alauda
NEWS_KEY=blahblahblah

• npm install or npm i to download Node modules that are used by the app locally.
• npm run dev to run the app locally.
• You can view the app on http://localhost:3000/

Testing

npm test or npm t will run the tests

Tech stack

Front end	Backend	Testing
HTML5	Node.js	Jest
CSS3 (BEM)	Express	Travis CI
Javascript	Handlebars
	MongoDB