This project is a prototype of a carpooling app developed for academic project. This system was created to help students organize and book rides to the college in a practical and sustainable way.
UniDrive is website developed with Node.js and PostgreSQL that allows students to:
- Offer rides: telling the trip details, such as time and local of departure.
- Search rides: fiding drivers who can take them to college.
The main motivation is to reduce the number of cars in circulation and contribute to the reduction of gas emissions, promoting a positive environmental impact. The destination of carpooling is always the college, allowing more integration between students.
The project aims to align with two of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals: SDG11, which seeks to create sustainable cities and communities, and SDG13, which seeks actions to mitigate global climate change.
- Back-end: Node.js (Express.js)
- Data Base: PostgreSQL
- Template Engine: EJS
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User Registration and Login:
- Each user can register as a driver or passenger.
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Ride-Hailing System:
- Drivers can create ride-hailing offers.
- Passengers can pick up and request available rides.
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Simple and intuitive interface:
- Design with usability in mind, allowing the system to be easily used by any student.
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Improvements
- Make the interface more attractive and intuitive.
- A request is made to the Open Weather API every time a page that requires weather data is loaded, it would be valid to re-check the number of requests for cases where the pertinent data has already been accessed, thus avoiding redundant requests.
- Some students have classes both in the morning and at night, it would be valid to implement a logic that supports these cases.
- The current logic (11/20/2024) does not validate the data entered during registration and this may compromise the operation of the program.
- Improve the HTML and CSS implementation.
- ...
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New Features
- Make the website responsive.
- Calculate the kilometers and grams for each user based on their rides.
- Create a way for the user to change the data entered during registration.
- Create a way for the user to cancel the trip in which they are registered.
- Create a way for the user to re-register their classes.
- Create the possibility of registering for more than one trip.
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Bugs
- During the tests, it was common to have errors when trying to acquire data from the Open Weather API, but I believe that this is just a problem in communicating with the servers.
- On the profile page, if the page is reloaded the site will "crash", I have not investigated the problem in depth but probably the cause is the obtaining of the profile data that is being viewed.
- ...
- Clone the repository
git clone <repository-url>- Install dependencies:
npm install- Create an .env file in the project root and configure the environment variables
# Server port, if not specified, it will be port 3000
PORT=your_port
# DB Variables
DB_HOST="localhost"
DB_PORT=db_port (probably 5432)
DB_USER=your_user
DB_PASSWORD=your_password
DB_NAME=db_name
# Open Weather API Key
OPEN_WEATHER_KEY=your_key
# Google Maps API KEY
GOOGLE_MAPS_KEY=your_key- Start Server
node index.jsSee below some images that show some features and pages of the site.