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Hey! Welcome to Arbitrage Tracker Project. We're making a web app that leverages the [Unofficial Messenger API][api] to create a Word Cloud of a Facebook Messenger thread's chat history for the day. Any contributions to the project are welcome and all will be reviewed. To make a pull request please consult the Github Documentation.

Note: Nothing below is written in stone, it just provides a solid, proven foundation for multiple developers of different skill levels to make impactful contributions to the project. Feel free to make suggestions.

We should strive to make this project both fun and a resume builder for people of all skill levels on the project, so a modern stack is a must. The stack that makes the most sense to achieve all these goals is MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js).

Note: This stack is entirely JavaScript. If you do not have much knowledge of JavaScript, it's best to check out Mozilla's excellent tutorials.

As stated above we will be using React to display data to the user. If you are not familiar with React and want to contribute to the UI, check out this tutorial by Facebook.

If you don’t have an understanding of Express, Node.js , Server-Side JavaScript check out this excellent tutorial by Mozilla

Note: Since we have many people working on a project that don't have much experience with JavaScript, we should use ES6 everywhere (not only will this be less confusing for newer developers, but desctructuring is awesome).

We will be using MongoDB and hosting it through mLab since anything NoSQL is much easier to throw unstructured data at than redis.

Note: Since we have many people working on a project that don't have much experience with NoSQL, we will be using a MongoDB wrapper called Mongoose.

This section will detail all the suggested tools that will be used over the course of this project.

This project will be using ES6 on the front and back ends for simplicity. We will be following the Airbnb Style Guide and will use their babel preset to keep code uniform.

Note: To limit the amount of inconsistencies with the linter and to have uniform extensions, it would be awesome for all that aren’t very experienced to use the same text editor. VS Code is amazing and since the .vscode file will not be included in the .gitignore, anyone who pulls down the project and uses VS Code will automatically have the same extensions installed by default.

Yarn and React go hand in hand, and unless you really like spending the extra 40 or so seconds to install your packages via npm you'll agree. We will be using Yarn for this project because there is not a single good reason not to.

Note: We will be using Node v9.3.0 because of it's tested compatibility with Yarn. You can check your node version by opening a terminal window and running node -v If you do not have this exact version, you can easily install it (if you have nvm ) by running nvm install 9.3.0 nvm use 9.3.0

We will be using Github for this project. If you are unfamiliar with git, github has provided several tutorials to help you out. If you are new to git, I would advise using a GUI like GitKraken instead of going through the command line.

Note: If you are using VS Code you get an amazing external merge tool right out the the box.

We will be hosting this project on AWS, while the database will be served via mLab

Note: Due to the free-tier of mLab stopping at a very reasonable 500MB we will only store data for a single day and then remove it from memory.

???

cd server && yarn
yarn start

cd app && yarn
yarn start

[api]: Unofficial Messenger API is the only way to automate chat functionalities on a user account. We do this by emulating the browser. This means doing the exact same GET/POST requests and tricking Facebook into thinking we're accessing the website normally.