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🤖 WiChat · ES4C

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📌 Project Description

WiChat is a project developed for the Software Architecture course (2024/2025). It is a distributed system composed of several services working together to build a question game application.

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👥 Development Team

Meet the amazing team behind WiChat:

Contributor	Profile
Adrián Mahía
Andrés Carballo
Bruno Pérez
Miguel Gutiérrez

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🧩 Microservices

• User Service: Manages user creation and storage.
• Auth Service: Handles user authentication.
• LLM Service: Interfaces with a Large Language Model.
• Gateway Service: Acts as a public proxy for the other services.
• Question Service: Gathers information from Wikidata and generates questions.
• Webapp: A React frontend that interacts with the backend via the gateway.

The user and auth services share a MongoDB instance accessed via Mongoose.

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🚀 Quick Start Guide

Clone the repository

git clone [email protected]:arquisoft/wichat_es4c.git

🔐 LLM API Key Configuration

In order to use the LLM integrations (Gemini and Empaphy), you must provide a valid API key in two .env files:

• In the webapp/ directory (for npm start):

REACT_APP_LLM_API_KEY="YOUR-API-KEY"

• In the project root (for Docker Compose):

LLM_API_KEY="YOUR-API-KEY"

Note: These files are ignored by Git and should not be committed. When deploying, the key must be added as a repository secret (LLM_API_KEY) to be used in GitHub Actions.

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🐳 Launching with Docker

docker compose --profile dev up --build

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🧱 Launching Component by Component

Start the database:

docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name=my-mongo mongo:latest

Or use services like MongoDB Atlas.

Then launch each service individually:

# Inside each service folder:
npm install
npm start

Finally, run the webapp the same way:

cd webapp
npm install
npm start

The application will be available at http://localhost:3000.

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☁️ Deployment

The application can be deployed using a virtual machine and GitHub Actions. The recommended setup includes:

• Ubuntu 20.04+ (preferably 24.04)
• Docker & Docker Compose
• Open ports: 3000 (webapp), 8000 (gateway)

You can set up Docker on your VM using:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal stable"
sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker-ce
sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}

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🔄 Continuous Delivery (GitHub Actions)

A GitHub Actions workflow automatically deploys the app when a new release is published. It builds, tests, pushes images, and deploys via SSH.

Example of the deploy step:

- name: Deploy over SSH
  uses: fifsky/ssh-action@master
  with:
    host: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_HOST }}
    user: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_USER }}
    key: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_KEY }}
    command: |
      wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arquisoft/wichat_es4c/master/docker-compose.yml -O docker-compose.yml
      docker compose --profile prod down
      docker compose --profile prod up -d --pull always

Secrets required:

• DEPLOY_HOST
• DEPLOY_USER
• DEPLOY_KEY