Follow the steps below to clone the project, install dependencies, and run the application locally.

Go to the folder you want to clone the repository into. Open a terminal in this folder an enter the following command:

git clone https://github.com/SkillVerser/freelancer-management-platform.git

Alternatively, use GitHub Desktop.

Once this is done, open this file location in a terminal. You should see something like

some-file-path\freelancer-manager-platform>

Next, run the following:

cd backend
npm install

Once that is done, use cd .. to go back to the root folder, then:

cd frontend
npm install

You have now installed the necessary dependencies.

From the root directory, use code . to open the project in VS Code. In the left pane, you should see the project structure, with subfolders backend and frontend. In the backend directory, create a new file and call it .env. This will hold environment variables (See Discord). You are now ready to run the app locally.

Open a terminal in VS Code. You should be in the root directory bu default. To start the backend server, run

cd backend
node server.js

Open another separate terminal. Again, you should be in the root directory. Run

cd frontend
npm start

After a few seconds, it should take you to the webpage on your browser. To stop both servers, go to each terminal and use Ctrl+C. Make sure that you restart the backend server after any changes if you want to see them on the web page.