Installation Guide

#UPDATED

Due to some weird bug in `php artisan serve` command it was causing the server to hangs while generating the access token using "Guzzle Http". So to fix that issue there was two options:

1. Either to create a virtual host and use the last commit (the one before this commit) as it is (this was how my dev environment was setup) **OR**,

2. To pull the latest commit in which I have modified the login procedure to make it work with `php artisan serve` command (i.e. Getting rid of Guzzle HTTP in login).

*** I have modified the login procedure to save the time needed to configure the virtual host.***

Configure Client App

1. Go to client directory and install required packages => cd client && npm install
2. Change .env file to match server URL
3. Run npm start
4. Open the browser and visit the given URL (usually "localhost/3000")

Configure Server App

1. cd server && composer install
2. This app is using MySQL database, so you will need to create a database first.
3. Copy the .env.example file and rename it to .env then change DB credentials and URL
4. Run php artisan migrate --seed. This will generate (5) dummy users as follows [user1@user.com, user2@user.com, ...etc]. All users password is 12345678. Also, will generate 30 dummy items.
5. Run php artisan passport:install
6. Run php artisan serve
7. Run php artisan queue:listen [THIS IS CRUCIAL TO ENABLE AUTO_BIDDING FEATURE, SEE NOTES BELOW]

Auto-bidding Feature

I have assumed that the max amount set by the user as an auto-bidding configuration will be ONLY used with auto-bidding. i.e. if the user sets the max-auto biding amount to 50$ this will mean that the maximum amount he will use for auto-bdding is 50$ plus whatever was the initial bidding value that was entered by the user manually when he first submit his/her bid.

IMPORTANT NOTES

1. To help mitigate the concurrency problem with auto-bidding I have used the Pessimistic Locking approach in conjunction with db transactions to ensure data consistency and isolation.

2. Why did I use Queues? Well, in order to enable auto-bidding feature I have to run this in the background to be able to control when to dispatch queue jobs and hence not to overload the server.

3. In order to enable auto-bidding feature you MUST start Laravel queue. You can do this by running php artisan queue:work