Deployment overview
What has to run for DevConnect to work.
DevConnect needs four external services, two of them optional with degradation:
- MongoDB (required) — every collection lives here. The backend exits on a failed connection; there is no retry.
- Redis (optional, degrades) — presence hash and the Socket.io adapter. Without it, realtime works on a single instance only.
- Cloudinary (optional, degrades) — image and document storage. Without
keys, uploads land in the backend
uploads/folder and are served statically by Express. - Email over Gmail SMTP (optional, degrades) — the contact form answers 503 without credentials.
The backend is one long-lived Node process serving HTTP and sockets from
the same port; the frontend is a static Vite build talking to it over REST
plus sockets. See Environment variables
for the full table and Hosting notes
for what the repo's vercel.json files actually configure.
Last verified against the documented commit on 2026-10-11. This project makes no claim about where the author hosts it.
Sources: backend/index.js, backend/config/database.js, backend/config/redis.js, backend/config/cloudinary.js (documented at commit cdef8af)