Business Finance Web Application

A business finance tracker for freshman students in the college of business at Oregon State University

Built with a React-App and a NodeJS API using PostgreSQL as a database management system.

Build/Setup (Tested on Ubuntu20.04.1)

PosgreSQL

Using a deployment of PostgreSQL, to learn about how to do this visit: postgresql.org

Once your deployment of PostgreSQL server is setup use the database-schema to create a database with the correct schema.

React-App

To deploy the react-app front-end there are 3 steps:

1. Navigate to the cob-finance-app folder
2. run: npm install (you might have to run npm audit fix to fix any node package vulnerabilities)
3. run: npm run build

After these steps the static web-page files will be located in frontend/build.

SSL

Our application runs on HTTPS only. So you'll need a SSL certificate. The template.env file has a line for the path of your .key and .cert files.

Server

To deploy the server side API and the static web-page files:

1. copy the folder frontend/build to the server/ folder.
2. navigate to the server folder.
3. run npm install

Setting up port numbers and PostgreSQL server access. The file: server/template.env has all required fields to be filled out for the application to connect to a PostgreSQL server and connect to a SAML-based identity provider. This file must be filled out and renamed to .env. Set DEV_MODE to true and provide a username and password. This will allow you to sign into an account bypassing the SAML authentication. Once deployed go to https://yourdeploymentip/dev and type in your dev password. Add admin accounts as needed and then stop the app and edit the .env so that DEV_MODE = false.

Deployment

Once all the steps above have been completed then the application is ready to be launched.

Launching the application is as simple as running node server.js in the server folder.