Ember - Backend

The organized, collaborative, and memorable way to plan your next adventure. Ember brings trip details, shared photos, and personal notes together in one place. It's well-suited for everything from weekend getaways to longer group adventures.

Coming Soon

View the live website · View the frontend repo

Motivation

Planning a trip often means juggling details across group chats, notes apps, and photo libraries. These tools can each handle one part of the process, but they make it difficult to keep plans and memories connected in one place. I built Ember to bring trip organization, shared photos, and personal notes together so friends, families, or even the solo-trip taker can coordinate their adventure and revisit their favorite moments with ease.

Currently in Development:

• Add Members to Trips
• Remove Members from Trips
• Edit user profile information
• Owner transferring between trips

Quick Start

1. Visit the Ember website.
2. Create an account or sign in.
3. Create a trip and start organizing your next adventure.

Usage

Trip Management

Users can create trips with a name, location, description, and optional travel dates. Trip owners can update trip details, replace the banner image, or delete the trip, while both owners and members can view only trips they belong to or have created.

Method	Endpoint	Description	Access
GET	/api/trips	List every trip owned by or shared with the current user	Member
POST	/api/trips	Create a trip and register its creator as the owner	Authenticated user
GET	/api/trips/:tripId	View a specific trip	Member
PATCH	/api/trips/:tripId	Update one or more trip details without overwriting omitted fields	Owner
PUT	/api/trips/:tripId/banner	Upload or replace a trip banner	Owner
DELETE	/api/trips/:tripId	Delete a trip and its related data	Owner

Trip dates use the YYYY-MM-DD format, and Ember prevents an end date from being set before the start date. Requests for trips outside the current user's membership return the same not-found response as nonexistent trips, avoiding disclosure of private trip IDs.

Profile Images and Trip Photos

Image uploads use multipart/form-data with a single field named image. JPEG, PNG, and WebP files are decoded and verified before storage rather than being trusted by their filename or reported MIME type.

Media	Endpoint	Maximum upload	Processing	Visibility
Profile image	PUT /api/me/profile-image	5 MB	Center-cropped to 512 × 512	Public URL
Trip banner	PUT /api/trips/:tripId/banner	5 MB	Attention-cropped to 1600 × 600	Member-only signed URL
Trip photo	POST /api/trips/:tripId/photos	10 MB	Constrained to 2400 × 2400 with a 600 × 600 thumbnail	Member-only signed URLs

Every accepted image is auto-oriented, converted to WebP, compressed, and written without its original metadata. Replacing a profile image or banner removes the previous object after the new database path is saved. Failed uploads and database writes trigger storage cleanup to reduce orphaned files.

Shared Trip Galleries

Every trip member can upload and view photos. Gallery responses use thumbnails, while the individual photo endpoint returns the larger stored version only when a user opens it. Private Supabase objects are returned through signed URLs that expire after an hour.

Method	Endpoint	Description	Access
GET	/api/trips/:tripId/photos	Browse newest-first thumbnail results	Member
POST	/api/trips/:tripId/photos	Upload a photo and generate its thumbnail	Member
GET	/api/trips/:tripId/photos/:photoId	View a full trip photo and its uploader	Member
DELETE	/api/trips/:tripId/photos/:photoId	Delete a photo	Uploader or trip owner

Gallery results use cursor pagination for stable loading as new photos are added.

Personal Trip Notes

Trip notes belong to a trip but remain private to their author. Members can use them for packing reminders, favorite locations, lessons learned, or anything else they want associated with the trip without sharing it with the rest of the group.

Method	Endpoint	Description	Access
GET	/api/trips/:tripId/notes	List the current user's notes for a trip	Note author and current member
POST	/api/trips/:tripId/notes	Create a private note	Current member
GET	/api/trips/:tripId/notes/:noteId	View one private note	Note author and current member
PATCH	/api/trips/:tripId/notes/:noteId	Update a note's title, content, or both	Note author and current member
DELETE	/api/trips/:tripId/notes/:noteId	Delete a private note	Note author and current member

Notes remain stored if a member is removed from a trip but become inaccessible until that membership is restored. Deleting the trip permanently removes all notes associated with it.

Contributing

Want to explore Ember locally or contribute to its development? The project includes its database migrations and an env template so you can get the API running with a fresh Supabase project.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, install or create:

• Git
• Node.js 24.18.0 and npm
• A Supabase project for PostgreSQL and object storage

The repository includes an .nvmrc file, so nvm users can install and select the correct Node version with nvm install.

1. Clone and Install

git clone https://github.com/BaileyKH/ember-be.git
cd ember-be
nvm install
npm ci

If you do not use nvm, install Node 24.18.0 and ignore the nvm install command.

2. Configure Supabase

Create three storage buckets in your Supabase project:

Bucket	Visibility	Purpose
profile-images	Public	User profile images
trip-banners	Private	Member-only trip banners
trip-photos	Private	Full trip photos and gallery thumbnails

3. Configure the Environment

You can either rename .env.example to .env or simply create a fresh .env file and copy the examples data replacing the placeholder information

Variable	Description
DB_URL	PostgreSQL connection string for the Supabase database
PORT	Local API port, such as 8080
PLATFORM	Use dev to enable development-only behavior (such as the reset endpoint for resetting the database)
JWT_SECRET	Long, unpredictable secret used to sign access tokens
SUPABASE_URL	Supabase project URL
SUPABASE_SECRET	Server-side Supabase secret or service-role key

You can create a JWT secret with:

openssl rand -base64 32

4. Prepare the Database

Apply the drizzle migrations to your supabase database:

npm run migrate

5. Start the Server

Compile and start the server:

npm run dev