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Prasanna Kumar
Prasanna Kumar

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Planning for my first Hackathon - DOHackathon

I decided to participate in my first ever hackathon and made a post yesterday about why it is very important to me. The idea that I chose to work on was an app that makes it easy for you to choose a movie to watch when you have a certain genre in mind.


Flixplore, like most other apps, will consist of

  • A React App as frontend.
  • An ExpressJS server as backend.

The frontend will be

The backend will be using

  • The TMDB API for movie suggestions and
  • The Utelly API for finding a place to watch the movie (Netflix, Prime, Disney+).

I could do this without a backend server. But I chose to have a backend because the external API's have a private key and they are rate limited. So it would be better to abstract this in a backend to keep the frontend straightforward.

With the DigitalOcean App Platform, I can deploy both my react app and express server as two different Components (Static Site and Service) of the same app. All components of an app will have the same domain but you can assign individual routes for them. So I need not enable CORS in my Express app.

Deploying the code to the app platform is very easy. Just link your Github repo. Whenever you push changes to the selected branch, the app platforms will build the new version of the app.

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raddevus profile image
raddevus

Looks very interesting. I look forward to seeing more as you develop this. I've completed my entry for the #dohackathon also and appreciate it if you take a look if you get a chance. Good luck in the challenge.