Setup instructions

1. Install yarn (version 1.22.x)
2. In this directory, run yarn install to install all the dependenceies.
3. Run cp server/.env.example server/.env to create an environment file, and fill in the relevant fields.
4. Set up Prettier to format your code consistently and automatically. The Prettier VSCode extension does this very well.

Development

Run yarn client and yarn server in separate terminals to start developing.

yarn build:client will type-check, compile, and bundle the frontend (everything in client/).

yarn build:server will type-check and compile the backend (everything in server/).

yarn build will build the entire project at once.

Note on TypeScript

Although Parcel is much faster and easier to configure than Webpack for builds, it does not perform type checking. Therefore, we expect development on this project will be done in an IDE that gives significant feedback when type errors occur (such as VSCode). This gives us the speed of Parcel, and the development advantages of TypeScript. While running yarn build:client performs type checking then uses Parcel to bundle the JavaScript, yarn dev may continue to work even when type errors are present.

Running in production

It's usually easiest to use something like pm2 to keep the process running and easily manage it:

yarn global add pm2
yarn build:client               # might take a full minute or so to run
pm2 start server/server.js
pm2 save                        # save configuration so pm2 can restart server.js on VM reboot