Muwebles: A Serverless E-commerce Platform

This project is a full-stack, serverless e-commerce website built as a commissioned proof-of-concept for a student's thesis. It provides a complete online shopping experience for a furniture store, from browsing products to completing payments, and includes a full administrative backend for site management.

Key Features

• Customer Facing:
  • Dynamic product catalog and browsing
  • User account creation and login
  • Persistent shopping cart
  • Secure checkout with PayPal integration
• Administrative Panel:
  • Role-based access for administrators
  • Full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality for products
  • Customer order tracking and status management
  • User account appeal and management system

Technology Stack

• Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery
• Backend & Services:
  • Google Firebase: Used as the complete serverless backend.
  • Firebase Authentication: For user registration and login (Email/Password).
  • Cloud Firestore: NoSQL database for all application data (users, products, orders).
  • Firebase Storage: For hosting all product imagery.
  • Firebase Hosting: For deploying and serving the live application.
• Payment Integration: PayPal API

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Getting Started (Developer Setup)

Follow these instructions to set up a local development environment.

1. Firebase CLI & Authentication

• Install the Firebase CLI, preferably using npm install -g firebase-tools.
  • Official Firebase CLI documentation
• Log in to your Google account using firebase login.

2. Project Initialization

• Create a new project in the Firebase Console.
• In your new project, get the firebaseConfig object and update the contents of public/scripts/firebase.js accordingly.
• Run firebase init in your local project directory.
• When prompted, select "Use an existing project" and choose the project you just created.
• Enable Firestore, Storage, and Hosting. Do not overwrite the existing public/index.html file.
• Troubleshooting: If the init command fails, try deleting the .firebaserc file and running it again.

3. Firebase Configuration

• Firestore Rules: Ensure your Firestore security rules allow reads and writes for development. The default rules are restrictive.
• Authentication: In the Firebase Console, go to Build > Authentication > Sign-in method and enable the Email/Password provider.

4. Creating an Admin User

• Register a new account through the application's register page.
• In the Firebase Console, go to Build > Firestore Database.
• Find the new user's document in your users collection.
• Manually add a new field named isAdmin, set its type to Boolean, and its value to true. This will grant access to the 'Admin Console' in the UI for that user.

5. Deployment

• To deploy the project to Firebase Hosting, run the command firebase deploy.