05_architecture.md

🏗️ PROJECT ARCHITECTURE AND HOW IT WORKS

The project is built on three containers that interact with each other via Docker Compose and are managed via GitHub Actions.

---

🧩 Container architecture components

Each module is responsible for its own part of the functionality:

• backend — Flask API application that processes REST requests and business logic
• frontend — Express application on Node.js that provides a web interface and requests data from the backend
• nginx — reverse proxy that receives external requests and forwards them to the desired container

📊 Component interaction diagram:

Client  ──►  NGINX (Reverse Proxy)  ──►  Frontend (Node.js Express)
                                │
                                └─────►  Backend (Flask API)

---

⚙️ Role Docker Compose

Docker Compose provides:

• 📦 Quick deployment of the entire infrastructure based on docker-compose.yml
• 🔗 Creation of a common network between services (by default — bridge)
• 🛠️ Simplified launch and testing of components in isolation

Example of launch:

sudo docker compose up --build

🔁 GitHub Actions Role

GitHub Actions automates the CI/CD process:

• 🧪 CI (Continuous Integration): testing and building images with each push
• 📤 CD (Continuous Delivery): publishing Docker images to Docker Hub

📦 CI/CD Pipeline:

• ✅ The developer makes a push to the main or dev branch
• 🏗️ GitHub Actions runs a workflow from .github/workflows/docker-ci.yml
• 🐳 For each component:
  • Build a Docker image
  • Run tests (if any)
  • Login to Docker Hub using secrets
  • Push an image to Docker Hub with tags (e.g. USERNAME/backend:latest)
• 🚀 After a successful publish, you can:
  • Run locally with docker-compose.yml
  • Deploy to production with docker-compose.prod.yml