💁‍♂️ Built a Dev.to replica with The MERN stack and more

Marwan mostafa — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 12:43:50 +0000

Dev.to-clone

A Dev.to clone created with MERN stack and more (Essentially FB without stories feature)🥳

Inspire
The Experience
Tech used
Features
Screenshots
Links
Setup locally
Do me a favor
Credits

Inspire

First of all, I did not think of clonning another websites in my whole journey, Only to know what I'm capable of after learning the MERN stack 4 months ago.

I was looking for a frontendmentor project as usual that will confirm and prove my skills but I didn't find any backend related only frontend as the website mentions.

After a lot of searching I got inspired by a few people that have cloned dev.to website, Some cloned the frontend only and some both with different tech stacks.

And because It's already cloned by others Despite being a few😌 I had to make an exact ~~clone~~ replica with lots of features that didn't exist in other clones. Giving me the opportunity for clonning one of the best blogging, multipage and challenging website.

It took me about 4 months in total, So don't get desperate and:

Doesn't matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

The Experience

It was really challenging in these different layouts especially on mobile, Also browser support wasn't that good so I couldn't use some stuff as in css the :has() pseudo class.

I Deep dived in Redux toolkit and RTK query, Learned lots of stuff like lazy quering and cache invalidation.
I practiced Json web tokens (aka JWT) in advance for issuing access & refresh tokens on login either from Google/Github OAuth or manual authentication and logging them out automatically after expiration.

Got familiar with Vercel/Render deployments, Faced so many problems in this journey, It was full of error handling, stress and panicking😂, There was alot going on in this phase.

Eventually, I was satisfied and pleased with the results!

Don't forget to share this as much as possible and let's get started folks😇.

Tech used

Frontend

React
Redux toolkit (Advanced RTK)
Tailwind
Styled components
Framer motion
React router
Cloudinary (Image hosting)

Backend

MongoDB
Express
Node.js
OAuth (Google/Github)
JWT
Socket.io (Real-time)
Cloudinary
Mongoose
Axios

Features

Login / Signup
View / Edit Profile
Google / Github OAuth
Ultimate mobile responsiveness
Real-time Notifications Toasted
CRUD Posts / Comments / Replies / Tags
Follow / Unfollow Users
Follow / Unfollow Tags
Like / Unicorn / Bookmark Posts
Like comments
Advanced Search engine for posts, people and tags
Filter for posts
Reading List
Dashboard

Screenshots

Login / Signup / Edit / Delete

Google / Github OAuth

Create / Update / Edit / Delete Posts

Reactions / Comments / Follows with Real-time notifications (Toasted)

Tags / ReadingList

Dashboard

Search Engine

Links

Client: https://marwanm-devto-clone.vercel.app

Server: https://marwanm-devto-clone-server.onrender.com

Source: https://github.com/marwanm-dev/Devto-clone

How to setup locally

Clone Repo

Clone the repo to your local machine by

Setup

Install all dependencies in both client and server subdirectories by npm i

$ cd server && npm i
$ cd client && npm i

Create

A MongoDB database either locally or online via MongoDB Atlas
A Cloudinary account
A new project on Google Cloud Platform
A .env file in in both client and server subdirectories
ENV variables

client/.env:

BASE_URL=
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=${GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID}
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=${GITHUB_CLIENT_ID}
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=${GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET}

server/.env:

ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=
REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET=

CLIENT_URL=

GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=${GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID}
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=${GITHUB_CLIENT_ID}
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=${GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET}

DB_NAME=
DB_USER=
DB_PASSWORD=

CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=
CLOUDINARY_DEFAULT_URL= // default image url
CLOUDINARY_DEFAULT_PUBLIC_ID= // default image public_id

Finally, run npm run stack on the root of the two subdirectories

Do me a favor

Social

Since I'm new to blogging, I will ask you to Share this as much as you think I deserve!

Support

Buy me a coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/marwanm

Credit

Dev.to clone by me

DEV Community: Marwan mostafa