#CuriousCoffee

Source code for the Curious Coffee initiative

Table of content

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Config
  • App
  • DB
  • Admin
  • Verify
  • Devmode
• Deploying curious coffee

Introduction

#CuriousCoffee is a initiative designed to break down silos within an organisation and match participants with people from different departments. Participants can register on the site and the system will ad-hoc match participants, as well as email them to inform them they've been matched and with who. It's then up to the matched participants to decide what to do next.

It is written in TypeScript, and by default uses MongoDB as it's data store and AWS-SES as it's notifier.

Prerequisites

You will need the following:

• npm
• Node.js
• TypeScript
• MongoDB (See below for more details)
• AWS-SES (See below for more details)

Database

By default, Curious Coffee uses MongoDB via MongooseJS. An attempt has been made to make this as generic as possible (see the src/database module), but the models themselves need to be bound in a certain way via Mongoose. This makes it a bit harder to swap out, but the models aren't complicated so it shouldn't be much work.

Notify

By default, Curious Coffee notifies participants three times - during registration, when they have verified, and when they have been matched. The default implementation of this uses AWS-SES (see the src/notify module). This can be swapped out for another provider easily enough as the notify module has been built so that the user simply needs to configure the from, to, subject and body of the email before calling notify(params). This can also be extended to use other types of notifications by adding an interface for the new type of communication (for example, SMS) and then adding an object of that interface to the Params interface.

Config

Config is stored in the env_vars folder (in root) and needs to be sourced to run properly. Change the env vars to match whatever settings you need.

The config can then be used as follows:

//import the config module
import config from './config';

//access it as a normal object
const port = config.app.port;

//start the listener
app.listen(port, () => {
    console.log('Listening on port ' + port);
});

The environment variables needed are below.

Item	Type	Description	Example
APP_PORT	Integer	The port that the application is run on	3000
DB_URL_SERVER	String	MongoDB server location	"mongodb://localhost:"
DB_URL_PORT	Integer	MongoDB port	27017
DB_NAME	String	MongoDB db name	"curious_coffee"
ADMIN_PASSWORD	String	Password for that admin site	"test"
VERIFY_SIGNATURE	String	Signature to be appended to email before being Base64 encoded to generate unique verify link	"test"
VERIFY_URL	String	Base URL to attach to verification email so user can verify their email	"http://localhost:3000/verify"
NODE_ENV	string	Used to determine what environment is being run (dev, test, prod, etc)	"dev"
AWS_REGION	string	Used to determine which AWS region to use	"eu-west-1"

Deploy

To deploy your own implementation of Curious Coffee:

git clone https://github.com/companieshouse/innovation-curious-coffee.git

Inside the directory:

npm install

Build the contents and run:

./run.sh