Untappd Compare is an app that allows you to compare mutual ratings between two users of Untappd, a craft beer rating app. The ratings are fetched via Untappd API.

After registering as a user and logging in, the app allows you to:

• request and view a comparison
• view all comparisons
• view all of your comparisons
• save comparisons to your account

Untappd Compare was my first app built with Node.js & Express. It uses MongoDB as a database and was deployed to AWS EC2 and linked with the domain.

The app has two parts:

• backend API that returns JSONs
• simple server side rendered front-end

During this project I purposefully tried to stick to low level implementations (i.e. avoiding templating) in order to understand better how things work without some of the abstractions.

Since this was a primarily backend focused project, there is no styling.

• Node.js and Express (i.e. routing, middelware, error handling)
• MongoDB & Mongoose (i.e. setting up DB, defining models, accessing and writing to DB with Mongoose)
• Architecture based on models, controllers, services and utilities/helpers
• Authorization and authentication with bcrypt and JSON Web Tokens with tokens stored in cookies (not ideal)
• Setting up environment variables with dotenv
• Backend API routes returning JSON
• Server side rendered front-end with routes returning HTML files and HTML strings
• Conditionally rendering HTML elements with JS (i.e. Register & Login vs Logout or "Save Comparison" vs "You already saved this comparison")
• Automatically savings all new comparison requests to DB (after request, the route checks if such comparison already exists in DB - if yes, it fetches it from the DB and if not, it fetches it from Untappd API and saves to DB)
• Submit requests with HTML forms, VSCode REST Client and Postman
• Deploying to AWS EC2 instance (including DB)
• Connecting the deployed app to a domain

• Implement refresh tokens