sTUMatch Frontend

This repository contains the source code of the sTUMatch frontend.

Context about the project:
sTUMatch is a social platform where students of a specific university can connect to others via comments on university news, a dedicated matching system and a chat. sTUMatch allows university employees to post about interesting events and advertisers to create and host advertisements target specifically at students of the respective university.

The prototype was written as part of the SEBA Master course in a team of 4 students (Nhu, Manu, Khang, Jonas). Prior experience with the technologies at hand was close to zero for most team members and the given time frame for completion was about ~2 months only. Additionally, in classical student-project-fashion, a lot of quick-and-dirty last minute work was done closely before the final submission.
The code reflects this situation in parts, so don't expect best practices accross the board - nontheless, the final prototype overall works well and can certainly be looked at!

Getting Started

⚠ IMPORTANT ⚠

One of our use-cases introduces self-written advertisments. A lot of ad-blockers will block the endpoints in the backend. We consider ad-blocker evasion a topic that goes way beyond the scope of a prototype (in fact, that's a topic that whole teams of developers are paid for - that's too much for students 😉). Therefore the simplest solution is to:

➡ Disable your ad-blocker when using the page!

Installing Packages

Ensure that NodeJS is installed on your machine. Clone the repository and install the packages:

git clone https://gitlab.lrz.de/seba-master-2021/team-29/frontend.git stumatch-frontend

cd stumatch-frontend
npm i

Running the Application

Clone and run the sTUMatch Backend repository (follow the instructions in its README for details). Once the backend is running locally, you can start the frontend part of the application using your terminal:

# Recommended: Run in Development mode:
npm start

# Or alternatively, run in Production mode:
npm run watch-production

The command will start a local development server on port 8080. To access the frontend, open your favorite browser and navigate to localhost:8080.

You can try logging in with the following credentials:

E-Mail	Password	Roles
[email protected]	Admin123	All roles.
[email protected]	Admin123	All roles.
[email protected]	Admin123	All roles.
[email protected]	Admin123	All roles.
[email protected]	Student123	Student role.
[email protected]	Educator123	Educator role.
[email protected]	Advertiser123	Advertiser role.
[email protected]	Admin123	Admin role.

Debugging the Application with VS Code

The repository contains a launch configuration for VS Code and Google Chrome/Microsoft Edge. The configuration allows you to set breakpoints and debug the code from VS Code.

To use the debugger, start the development server normally via npm start. You can then, at any point in time, start a debugging session using F5.

You can select the browser which you want to use by selecting the respective debug configuration in VS Code's debug workspace: