This webpage allows new users to sign up for Abalobi Marketplace. By default, after registering, their approval status is set to false and they will not be able to log into the Marketplace app yet. An Abalobi administrator can approve new users from the Abalobi admin panel, after which the new users will be approved and able to log in.

This repository is developed in Ionic but deployed as a website hosted on Heroku. This required some extra setup, since Ionic apps are really meant to be deployed as mobile apps, not as websites (this also means that there are extra things to keep in mind when working on this repo, so please read this whole document as background before starting). New updates can now be deployed by simply pushing to the deploy branch, Heroku tracks this branch and once it sees any changes it will update the deployed website automatically.

Normally Ionic apps can be deployed in a browser by running $ ionic serve. This builds the Ionic app to the /www directory and then automatically opens a localhost port through which the build is served. This is similar to the function performed by ng serve in Angular sites.

Heroku, however, does not know how it should build and serve the Ionic app. Therefore, we need to manually set up a small Node.js server pointing to the /www folder to serve our website. This is done by simply creating a file called server.js in the root of the repository. You will see that this file contains a few lines of code to start a Node server on port 5000. Also ensure that the following line is a child of the scripts key in package.json: "start": "node server.js". You can test that this works by running npm start in the command line. If everything is fine you will now be able to see the website at localhost:5000. If you make changes to your code you first have to run ionic serve or ionic build to rebuild the \www folder, after which the changes will reflect at localhost:5000.

Since the /www folder is built every time ionic serve runs it is included in the .gitignore file by default. However, since Heroku is not going to run ionic serve and will instead deploy the contents of the /www directory directly on our little Node server, we need to ensure that we push the contents of the /www folder to our repository. Do this by simply removing /www from the .gitignore file.

Removing the /www folder from .gitignore has a few adverse effects. When serving the app through ionic serve or npm start the /www folder is locked. But since git is now also tracking any changes to the /www folder some strange and interesting things can happen when we try to switch branches while the app is being served. Usually files in /www folder is deleted. This can be avoided by simply ensuring that you are not running the app in the command line before switching branches in git