Summary

The MERN Social application developed in this chapter demonstrated how the MERN stack technologies can be used together to build out a fully-featured and functioning web application with social media features.

We began by updating the user feature in the skeleton application to allow anyone with an account on MERN Social to add a description about themselves, and also to upload a profile picture from their local files. In the implementation of uploading a profile picture, we explored how to upload multipart form data from the client, then receive it on the server to store the file data directly in the MongoDB database, and then be able to retrieve it back for viewing.

Next, we updated the user feature further, to allow users to follow each other on the MERN Social platform. In the user model, we added the capability to maintain arrays of user references to represent lists of followers and followings for each user. Extending this capability, we incorporated follow and unfollow options...