🪿 GOOSE — Social Media Application

Author: Alvin He
Vanderbilt Email: alvin.t.he@vanderbilt.edu

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🚀 Project Overview

GOOSE is a full-stack social media application built with a React frontend and a Node.js + Express backend, using MongoDB for persistence. It includes user authentication, posting, and media upload support (Cloudinary).

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✅ Prerequisites

• Node.js (LTS recommended)
• MongoDB connection (local instance or cloud-hosted like MongoDB Atlas)
• (Optional) Cloudinary account for image uploads

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📦 Installation & Running the App

1. Clone the repository:

git clone <repo_url>
cd <repo_folder>

2. Install and run the backend (server):

cd server
npm install
npm run dev

The server will run on http://localhost:3000

3. Install and run the frontend (client):

Open a new terminal window:

cd client
npm install
npm run dev

The client will run on http://localhost:5173

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🔐 Environment Variables

Client (.env in client folder):

VITE_API_URL=http://localhost:3000/api

Server (.env in server folder):

PORT=3000
MONGO_URL=your_mongodb_connection_string
JWT_SECRET=your_jwt_secret
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=your_cloud_name
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=your_api_key
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=your_api_secret

Note: The .env files are included with this submission with working credentials.

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💭 Reflection

This coding challenge was very difficult because it was my first time doing full-stack development. I felt that MongoDB and the API requests were pretty easy to understand, but I didn't expect the frontend to take as long as it did. The most challenging aspect was debugging and making sure that the user authentication was always working when it needed to.

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