MVP

This is a student project for Codeop's fullstack bootcamp.

The idea is to create an easy-to-use way for people to reach their representatives. It's aimed at young people, the clinically-online kind who flipped Gamestop's stocks.

For this I used puppeteer, the openAI API, and nodemailer (on top of React and Javascript).

There is one main endpoint, where the user clicks on a crystal ball and receives a message OpenAI-GPT created based on: the politician's party official webpage (or the most official webpage I could find) and the theme the user chose (so far either climate change, social policies or housing issues). Here is a schema to try to explain data flow:

Setup

Dependencies

Run npm install in the project folder to install dependencies related to Express (the server).

cd client and run npm install install dependencies related to React (the client).

Install puppeteer and nodemailer (see web for instructions).

Rename the .env.example just .env and add your own data. Contact me for the OpenAI account. I tried to leave the API key in the env.example, but OpenAI disabled it because it was on github (which, thinking about it, makes sense).

Use another email account to receive/send test emails and enable a SMTP connection.

Database Prep

Run npm run migrate in your TERMINAL, in the project folder. This will create two tables called 'politicians' and 'parties' in your database. **Then run npm run scrap to populate the tables. (If you want to see the pages open, change headless to true in both functions. You will get a headless deprecation warning, which sounds macabre... ignore it.) BE AWARE it is SLOW. It should print 'Connected!' a bunch of times. As long as it doesn't give an error, you should be good to go.

Run Your Development Servers

• ****** VERY IMPORTANT**** When you are testing out the code, comment out the whole try/catch part of the createMailWithParams(magic) function in index.js. The two commented lines above can be used for testing. ****** IF YOU DO NOT DO THIS you will spend tokens everytime you save. Guess how I found out*********

• Run npm start in project directory to start the Express server on port 4000

• cd client and run npm run dev to start client server in development mode with hot reloading in port 5173.

• Client is configured so all API calls will be proxied to port 4000 for a smoother development experience. Yay!

• You can test your client app in http://localhost:5173

• You can test your API in http://localhost:4000/api

Thoughts on feature extensions

• I think the user could give more input (give its email address to receive a copy, choose a politician?)
• I would have liked to create a user page, where they'd accumulate points (a la Neopets)
• I found out this existed at the last minute: https://api.quehacenlosdiputados.es/
• I think there could be more magic churchy things but maybe that's just me

CREDIT

• FONTS :

1. Mom'sTypewriter is copyright Christoph Mueller 1997.
2. Retro King from dafonts.com