CRM API

This app is the backend for a CRM service that allows users to view customers

Getting Started With Docker

These apps are built to work with docker and docker-compose so that the whole ecosystem can be run locally.

If you would like to run things locally without docker (not recommended), see the section at the bottom on Getting Started Without Docker.

Prerequisites

If you haven't already, download and install Docker and Docker Compose.

Once you have docker installed, you will need to create a .env file for each service you would like to run (user, customer, photo). The recommended settings are stored in the README of each respective service.

There should also be a .env at the top level folder where the docker-compose.yml file is with the following values:

GATEWAY_PORT=80
CUSTOMER_PORT=1500
USER_PORT=2020
PHOTO_PORT=3333
STORAGE_PORT=9000
MONGO_PORT=27017

A Note for Mac Users

Before running the apps via docker you will need to change lines 39, 40, and 44 from:

c:/data/db:data/db
c:/data/configdb:data/configdb
c:/data/data1:/data1

to:

/tmp/data/db:/data/db
/tmp/data/configdb:/data/configdb
/tmp/data1:/data1

Running

To get all the services running at once, the following command will set up and run everything:

docker-compose up

Please note that the first time running this command will take slightly longer.

Now that the apps and supporting services are up and running, you can go to the specified ports on localhost to see the swagger docs for each service.

Using the App

The app includes a small gateway that is designed to be replaced by a cloud provider gateway (e.g. AWS API Gateway, etc). All requests for the application can go through localhost:8080.

Once everything is running, you can go to the following swagger documents:

localhost:8080/user-swagger
localhost:8080/customer-swagger
localhost:8080/photo-swagger

Auth

The app includes a method of verifying a user's access via a JWT. However, assuming that we use a third-party provider for login/auth, I have not included that functionality in this app. For now, we ca obtain a JWT by going to (jwt.io)[https://jwt.io], and putting in the following values for the payload:

  "iat": 1588905546,
  "exp": 1620441546,
  "sub": "5eb4a2dce57e2e196c6793ae",
  "role": "ADMIN"

Make sure to specify the same value for the secret as what is in your JWT_SECRET env variable.

Getting Started Without Docker

Docker is recommended for this system, however if it is not available then following the instructions below will get you up and running.

Prerequisites

You will need to download and install each of the following in order to run the apps:

• Node.js
• MongoDB
• Minio

Once you have each installed, you will need to create a .env file for each service you would like to run (user, customer, photo). The recommended settings are stored in the README of each respective service.

Running

For running the applications, we will need several terminals to run the different processes. In the first terminal, run MongoDB. The default settings are sufficient for a local run:

mongod

You will also need an additional terminal to run our S3-style object store:

minio server /path/to/data

next, for each service you will need to install the node modules before running it:

npm install && npm start

optionally, if you would also like to run the gateway, it will also work with the usual npm start command. Please note that the gateway is designed to be replaced in a production environment, so it only has hard-coded values for the service port configurations.

Repeat in a new terminal for the user, customer, and photo services.

And that's it! You should be able to see all of the swagger documents if you go to a service's port in your browser.

High Level Design and APIs

This project was designed with the following considerations and assumptions:

Considerations:

• The codebase should be as decoupled and scalable as possible.
• To promote decoupling, services will not call each other directly.
• The APIs will be humanly readable and useable as possible.

Assumptions:

• All users will belong to a company. However company APIs may be outside the scope of this project. I will add APIs for creating/updating companies if time allows.
• All users and admin users belonging to a company have permissions see all of their customers.

APIs

Apis and Entities

Above are the initial designs for the entities and available APIs, the entities may undergo some change but the APIs will stay the same.

Please note that I have not included any Auth APIs at this time.

Design

Initial high level design

The design for this application should generally be straightforward. All CRUD operations for Users and Customers will go through their respective services. However I would like to call attention to the photo upload flow.

There are two possibilities for implementing the photo upload/management flow.

First, this is the rough draft of the API for uploading a photo

uploadPhoto(imageData, customerId=null)

Option 1: The frontend application will call into the uploadPhoto API with the image data and no customerId. In this case the photo will be uploaded to the image store and the path to it will be returned to the frontend. From there the FE can call out to updateCustomer with the new image path.

Option 2: The frontend application will call into the uploadPhoto API with the image data and a customerId. Upon seeing the customerId the Photo Service will upload the image to the image store and add a message to RMQ to update the customer. The Customer Service will grab the message and add the photo path to the given customer document

There will only be photo uploads for customer documents at this time. However, should this requirement change we will only need to add a optional photo property to user documents.

Update: It seems that the addition of RMQ in this design was overly complex where it didn't need to be. Instead, I have left the option open for implementing RMQ down the line should it be deemed necessary. For now the calls to upload the photo and update the user can be managed by the frontend.

Running the tests

TBD

Deployment

TBD

Built With

• Nest.js - The web framework used

Authors

• Joel Milligan - Joelsalt

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Apis and Entities

Initial High Level Design