PICT Internal Hackathon — Web App

🌐 Live app: https://pict-internal-hackathon.onrender.com

A web application to run an internal hackathon: participants sign up, log in, create or join teams, submit their idea/presentation, and organisers manage the event. Built with Node.js, Express and MongoDB.

ℹ️ The original Heroku deployment (ihack2020.herokuapp.com) is gone — Heroku retired its free tier in November 2022 — so the app is now hosted free on Render (with a free MongoDB Atlas database). See Deploy for free on Render to spin up your own copy. The live instance sleeps after ~15 min idle, so the first request may take ~30–60 s to wake.

Features

• Auth — signup, login, logout with JWT stored in an HTTP cookie
• Password reset — email-based forgot/change password flow
• Teams — create a team, join via email invite, leave/remove members
• Submissions — upload a presentation (PPT) per team
• Dashboard — participant dashboard and evaluation views

Screenshots

Landing	Login
Event timeline & problem statements	Register-ID + password sign-in

Sign up	Forgot password
Participant registration with college-ID upload	Email-based password reset

Logged-in views

Profile	Team Profile	Team Submission
Participant profile	Team members & invite code	Submit team PPT

Contact details on the Profile screenshot are masked for privacy.

Tech stack

Layer	Tech
Runtime	Node.js (18–20)
Server	Express 4
Database	MongoDB via Mongoose
Views	EJS-rendered .html templates in public/
Auth	JSON Web Tokens (jsonwebtoken) + cookie-parser
Email	Nodemailer (Gmail)
Uploads	express-fileupload + AWS S3 (aws-sdk)

Project structure

app.js            Express app setup, Mongo connection, server start
routes/           Route definitions (root, account, fetch, team, file)
controllers/      Request handlers
models/           Mongoose models (User, Team)
middleware/       JWT auth guard
utils/            Encryption helpers
public/           HTML views, CSS, JS, images (served statically)

Run locally

Prerequisites: Node.js 18–20 and a MongoDB database (local, or a free MongoDB Atlas cluster).

git clone https://github.com/shadabshaikh0/PICT-Internal-Hackathon.git
cd PICT-Internal-Hackathon
npm install
cp sample-env .env      # then edit .env — see the table below
npm start

Open http://localhost:8080.

Environment variables

Variable	Required	Notes
MONGODB_URI	✅	MongoDB connection string.
SESSION_SECRET	✅	Exactly 32 characters — used for both JWT signing and AES-256 encryption.
BASE_URL	✅	App base URL, used to build password-reset links (e.g. http://localhost:8080).
PORT	⛅	Defaults to 8080. Hosting platforms set this automatically.
NODEMAILER_EMAIL	⬜	Gmail address for outgoing mail (password-reset / confirmation).
NODEMAILER_PASS	⬜	Gmail app password for the above account.
AWSID	⬜	AWS access key ID — only if using S3 PPT uploads.
AWSSECRET	⬜	AWS secret access key — only if using S3 PPT uploads.

✅ required · ⛅ auto-set by host · ⬜ optional (feature-specific). The app boots without the optional vars; only the matching feature (email / S3 uploads) is disabled.

Deploy for free on Render

This repo includes a render.yaml Blueprint, so most of the setup is automatic. You'll need two free accounts: MongoDB Atlas (database) and Render (host).

1. Create a free MongoDB database (Atlas)

1. Sign up at mongodb.com/atlas and create a free M0 cluster.
2. Database Access → add a database user (username + password).
3. Network Access → add IP 0.0.0.0/0 (allow from anywhere — Render's IPs are dynamic).
4. Connect → Drivers → copy the connection string. It looks like: mongodb+srv://<user>:<password>@cluster0.xxxxx.mongodb.net/hackathon?retryWrites=true&w=majority (replace <user>/<password>, and add a db name like hackathon before the ?).

2. Deploy on Render

1. Sign up at render.com and connect your GitHub account.
2. New + → Blueprint → select this repository. Render detects render.yaml.
3. When prompted, set the environment variables:
   • MONGODB_URI — the Atlas string from step 1
   • SESSION_SECRET — any 32-character string (e.g. run openssl rand -hex 16 → 32 hex chars)
   • BASE_URL — your Render URL, e.g. https://pict-internal-hackathon.onrender.com (you can set a placeholder first, then update it once Render assigns the URL)
4. Click Apply / Create. Render runs npm install then npm start.
5. Open the assigned *.onrender.com URL — the login page should load.

Note: Render's free web service spins down after ~15 minutes of inactivity, so the first request after idle takes ~30–60 s to wake up. That's expected on the free plan.

License

See repository. Originally bootstrapped from sahat/hackathon-starter.