📚 LitBay - Mini E-Commerce Platform

LitBay is a full-stack Mini e-commerce platform built using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) with Tailwind CSS for styling. It lets users explore, search, and purchase books online — while admins manage products, categories, and orders.

here's live link: https://d3ai0wwxkr3sud.cloudfront.net

Features

• Light/dark mode toggle
• Responsive

👥 Users

• Register and log in securely (with Express-Session + Bcrypt for password hashing)

• Browse, search, and filter books by category or journal

• View detailed book information

• Place and track orders

• Persistent sessions and authentication

🧑‍💼 Admin

• Full CRUD for Books (Products)

• Full CRUD for Categories

• Manage orders and view user data

• Dashboard overview for easy management

Tech Stack

Client: React, TailwindCSS

Server: Node, Express

Database: MongoDB Atlas

Authentication: Express-Session, Bcrypt (password hashing)

Hosting/DevOps: AWS EC2, Nginx, S3, CloudFront

Installation

Install LitBay with npm

git clone https://github.com/hafzism/litbay.git

cd litbay

cd backend
npm install

cd ../frontend
npm install

Environment Variables

To run this project, you will need to add the following environment variables to your .env file

PORT

DATABASE_URI

SESSION_SECRET

NODE_ENV

and in frontend , VITE_API_URL

Feedback

If you have any feedback, please reach out to us at hafeezpallath@gmail.com

Lessons Learned

Building a full MERN app from scratch

CRUD operations with MongoDB & Mongoose

Using Express-Session for authentication

Hosting apps with Nginx + AWS EC2 + S3 + CloudFront

Managing frontend-backend communication using Axios

Responsive UI with Tailwind CSS

Contributing

Contributions, suggestions, and feedback are always welcome! If you’d like to improve Libay:

Fork this repository

Create a new branch (feature/new-feature)

Commit your changes

Open a Pull Request 🎉

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License — feel free to use, modify, and share!