LivePerson Twitter Search

LivePerson Twitter Search uses Twitter's API for finding out tweets with #liveperson and stores the result into a SQL Lite database. This solution is composed of two different applications:

• A Node.js REST API
• An Angular web application

Environment Variables

Our environment variables store values used application-wide. You can change the project's environment variables by editing the following file:

For a development environment:

src/environments/environment.ts

For a production environment:

src/environments/environment.prod.ts

Once you've opened the appropriate environment's file, please change the apiUrl attribute value to the one that corresponds to your back-end address. Our front-end uses http://localhost:3000/api/v1 as a default value for the apiUrl attribute.

If you're running the Node.js API at a different port, for example at port 4000, please update it to:

apiUrl: http://localhost:4000/api/v1

Setup

Before running this project, you need to install all the required dependencies with the following command:

$ npm install

Running

Once you've set up your back-end environment and get it up and running, start the front-end application by running the following command:

$ npm run start

Angular uses port 4200 as default, so you can access it by opening the following address in your web browser:

http://localhost:4200/

Running tests

You can run the unit tests by executing the following command:

$ npm run test

Technical Decisions

date-fns

Using additional libraries to handle data is not usually a good decision, especially if you don't have to deal with complex date operations. Still, I have decided to use date-fns, a simple and consistent toolset for manipulating dates.

At our front-end, instead of showing formatted dates in our tweet's cards, I wanted a more human-readable way to display when a Tweet has been posted and, I found in date-fns a suitable solution for displaying relative dates.

Using a third-party library is not the best scenario for this use-case but, considering my available timeframe, I have made this decision to save development time. So, keep in mind that this is not a recommended decision for production-ready environments, it's for development purposes only.