Web Experiments Backend

Intro

Web Experiments backend is a monorepo for my AWS EB-hosted online portfolio website along with Node / Express / PHP / MySQL backends for various other personal projects including Weightlifting App and ESPN Fantasy Football stats.

Currently, I am in the process of deprecating my PHP / MySQL backend in favor of a AWS EB app running Node / Express with DynamoDB and S3 as my storage components. I previously had my backend running on a Linux instance managed by GoDaddy but I decided to convert to AWS due to reliability and cost benefits.

Contents

Online Portfolio

My portfolio website was written using React. This was previously done using Vue.js, although as my website continuous to expand React will become more and more useful, particularly in terms of code reuse and modularization. I also have nearly all my website's data stored as JSON files which allows me to easily update my projects, contact info etc. and integrates perfectly with React.

• Home page: www.chappyasel.com

Weightlifting App

While I have a decent amount of functionality already available in my Weightlifting App PHP API, I made the decision to switch to Express / Node.js for its vibrant developer community and plethora of helpful libraries. As I stated above, I am currently in the process of rewriting my API in JavaScript accessing a DynamoDB database instead of MySQL.

Eventually, I plan to support a variety of features in my Weightlifting API, including user creation / querying / updating / deletion, leaderboard querying, social features, and more.

Liar's Dice

Liar's Dice is a dice game that combines luck and skill as one must weigh probabilities with the game theory involved in predicting the decisions of other intellegent actors. I developed a simple tool to assist in deriving probabilities for each hand to aid in decision-making. This is exposed both as a simple React webpage as well as an API accessible by posting a POST request /api/v1/liarsdice/play

• Demo: www.chappyasel.com/liarsdice

ESPN Fantasy Football

The ESPN Fantasy Football season has recently begun and I've been interested in all the IBM Watson fantasy football insights ESPN has integrated in the past two years. While they have integrated these insignts to some extent, I think there is a lot of comparative and predictive functionality that is still missing.

Because of this, I have decided to start working on a web app / API that can be used to unlock deeper insights into player performance predictions along with a more accurate 'win probability' system that puts these predictions to use. Right now, I am working on reverse-engineering the ESPN Fantsy Football API and IBM Watson fantasy football insight system to use in my own web app. I am hoping that eventually I can create a supirior predictions system that shows win probability over time along with better player comparison tools, allowing fantasy football players to perform better in their leagues.

• Projections: /api/fantasy/v1/projections

Dependency Installation

npm install && (cd client && npm install)

Run

Development

To run the Express backend (exposed via localhost:3000):

npm run start-server-dev

To run the React frontend (exposed via localhost:8081):

npm run start-client-dev

To run both simultaneously (same ports as above; client running detached):

npm run start-dev

# to stop the detached client
npm run stop-dev

Production

npm run build && npm run start

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Deployment

npm run deploy

Setup

Add the following files to this project:

/shared/auth/keys.ts

export const AWS_CONFIG = {
  remote: {
    accessKeyId: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
    secretAccessKey: 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    region: 'us-east-1',
  },
  cognito: {
    userPoolId: 'us-east-1_xxxxxxxxx',
    clientId: 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  },
}

/api/util/access/keys.ts

export = {
  HEADERS: {
    INTERNAL: '<internal>',
    INTERNAL_DEVICE_ID: '<internal-device-id>',
  },
  INTERNAL_DEVICE_IDS: new Set([
    '<device uuid>', // device description
    ...
  ]),
}

/api/util/apns/keys.ts

export = {
  KEY_CERT: '<cert_name.p8>',
  KEY_ID: '<key id>',
  TEAM_ID: '<team id>',
  BUNDLE_IDS: {
    MAIN: '<com.company.app>',
    INTERNAL: '<com.company.app.internal>',
  },
  DEV_DEVICE_TOKENS: [
    '<dev device token>', // device description
    ...
  ],
}

/config/notif_cert.p8

• Can be retrieved from Apple for sending notifications via APNS
• See APNS with Node.js

Expose Localhost

To expose the active Express backend:

ngrok http 8081

To expose the active Express backend:

ngrok http 3000 -host-header="localhost:3000"