marcusvx / theluupe-interview

The Luupe Interview App

Stack

Introduction

Welcome to our interview App. The web application uses Next.js together with a custom server that uses graphql-yoga to run the GraphQL API. The main benefits of this are:

• Next.js provides SSR support for better search engine indexing and load times on slower devices, as well as a sensible and tested framework together with a mature ecosystem.
• GraphQL is becoming the standard for APIs, and something we can open up to other companies for integration purposes.
• Using a custom server with Next.js allows us to run both SSR and our GraphQL API with one command, on a single instance. This eases development and deployments until we need to separate these into separate projects.

The app is running on port 3000 and you will find the actual activities and requirements once you run the app and go to the main page (localhost:3000/)

Frontend

The frontend is built using React and written in a mix of ES2018 (ES9) JavaScript and TypeScript (currently under migration). Since the frontend interfaces with the backend via GraphQL, we use the Apollo Client for React together with the hooks interface to supply data to our components. Since Apollo already has a client side cache, we are using it with its local state support instead of having a separate state management system such as Redux.

We are using a customized version of Bootstrap 4 for our UI framework, including React components provided by React Bootstrap.

Most of the frontend-specific code is in the /src folder, and follows the Next.js folder structure conventions mixed with Atomic Design.

Backend

The backend server is powered by Express.js via the graphql-yoga server, which initially adds the GraphQL routes:

• /graphql hosts our main GraphQL endpoint
• /graphql/playground hosts a playground to test out queries/mutations
• /graphql/subscriptions hosts a websocket server for GraphQL subscriptions

Most of the backend-specific code is in the /server folder.

NOTE: If for some reason you can't run Node 12 in your computer this app should also work on Node 16. If you face any kind of issue please contact us.

Database

Our database code is managed by Prisma. On the backend, we interface with our database using Prisma Client on the backend, which is called in our GraphQL Nexus schema definition files. These definitions then generate .graphql files that are loaded into Apollo Server.

Installation

You will need the following (you'll need Homebrew on macOS):

# n (node version manager) and Yarn
brew install n yarn
# Install Node.js v12
sudo n 12

# Install the project dependencies
yarn install

You can also use nvm.

Then you can run the project using yarn dev.

Conventions

• Use async/await syntax for async calls
• Use React hooks where possible
• Use Apollo's local state where you would use Redux

We use Prettier, ESLint, and Husky to maintain code formatting/standards.