Pandox Blog Platform Backend

Backend for Pandox, a full-stack technical blogging platform. It is a TypeScript/Node.js API for authentication, users, articles, comments, likes, follows, image uploads, and Elasticsearch search.

Project Summary

Area	Summary
Product	Technical blogging platform for long-form articles with profiles, comments, social actions, and search
Backend scope	Express REST API, Sequelize models, auth middleware, seed script, image handling, and search routes
Core services	MySQL, Redis, local image storage
Search service	Elasticsearch, with data originally synced from MySQL through Logstash JDBC
Demo status	The Oracle VPS is offline. The project can be reviewed locally with seeded MySQL and Redis data. Elasticsearch can be enabled separately for search.

Engineering Highlights

• Built a TypeScript Express API with separate routes, controllers, middleware, models, and config files.
• Modeled users, pages, comments, threads, images, page keywords, likes, and follows with Sequelize associations.
• Added JWT login, protected routes, and Redis-based logout/token invalidation.
• Added a seed script that recreates tables and loads demo users, Markdown pages, images, comments, and keywords from local files.
• Added image upload and retrieval with Multer and local filesystem storage.
• Added Elasticsearch routes for page and user search, with a Logstash JDBC setup for syncing MySQL rows into Elasticsearch indexes.

Skills Shown

Skill	Evidence in this project
API design	Separate routers and controllers for auth, users, pages, comments, images, likes, follows, keywords, and search
Data modeling	Sequelize models and associations for one-to-many and many-to-many social/blog relationships
Auth/security	JWT tokens, auth middleware, Redis token invalidation, and environment-based secrets
Local demo data	Seeded users, articles, images, comments, and keywords for local review
Search setup	Elasticsearch query routes and documented Logstash JDBC indexing

Main API Areas

Domain	Representative routes
Auth	POST /api/access/auth/signup, POST /api/access/auth/signin, POST /api/access/auth/logout
Pages	GET /api/db/pagerecommend, GET /api/db/pages/:pageId, POST /api/db/pages, PUT /api/db/pages/:pageId
Users	profile retrieval, profile update, account rename, account deletion
Comments/threads	page discussion threads and comment flows
Images	POST /api/db/images, GET /api/db/images/:username/:imageId
Social	likes and follows
Search	GET /api/db/es/pages/:keyword/:pageIdx, GET /api/db/es/users/:keyword/:userIdx

Run Locally

Use Node 22 where possible. Very new Node versions may expose old transitive dependency issues unless JWT dependencies are updated.

npm install
cp .env.example .env
npm run dev

Expected backend .env:

MYSQL_HOST=localhost
MYSQL_USER=root
MYSQL_PWD=replace-with-your-local-password
MYSQL_DB=testdb
REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379
ELASTICSEARCH_HOST=http://localhost:9200
JWT_SECRET=replace-with-a-long-random-secret
JWT_EXPIRE_SECONDS=86400
JWT_ALGORITHM=HS256
PORT=8080
PROD_URL=https://your-backend-domain.example.com

Seeded login accounts:

Username	Password
pandoxone	1234
jzhang	1234
mshao	1234