Taskify

A job application tracker built for people who are actively job hunting and tired of maintaining a spreadsheet. Track every application, manage tasks around your search, and store email templates — all in one place.

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Images for your reference

What it does

Job tracking — Log every application with the company, role, date, opening type (public / referral / internal), and status (applied → shortlisted → interviews → selected). Company logos are auto-fetched via Clearbit for 60+ companies, and a fuzzy search lets you find a company and pull its logo while adding a new job.

Task management — General to-do list with due dates, priority levels (low / medium / high), and descriptions. The dashboard shows what's due today. The tasks page categorises everything into Overdue / Today / Tomorrow / Upcoming tabs.

Templates — Store reusable email templates organised by category (cover letter, resume, cold email, follow-up, other) and type (technical, behavioral, general). Ships with 8 sensible defaults that get seeded on first login.

Stale job reminders — A cron job runs daily at 9 AM. If you applied to a job and haven't heard back in 14+ days, you get an email reminder listing everything that's gone quiet. The email is sent asynchronously through a RabbitMQ worker — the cron job just publishes a message; a separate worker process sends the actual email.

Password reset — Forgot password sends a 6-digit OTP via email (also through the async worker, not inline). OTPs expire after 10 minutes.

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Tech

Layer	What
Frontend	React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
Backend	Node.js, Express
Database	MongoDB (Mongoose)
Cache	Redis — job lists are cached per-user for 5 minutes, cache is busted on any write
Queue	RabbitMQ with two durable queues: email_notifications and job_reminders
Auth	JWT in an HttpOnly cookie, bcrypt with 12 rounds, Zod validation on every input
Email	Nodemailer (Gmail)

Redis and RabbitMQ are both optional — the server starts fine without them, just with caching and queueing disabled.

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Running locally

Prerequisites

• Node.js ≥ 18
• MongoDB running locally (or a connection string to Atlas)
• Redis and RabbitMQ if you want caching/email (optional)

Backend

cd backend
cp .env.example .env
# Fill in .env — at minimum MONGO_URI and JWT_SECRET
npm install
npm run dev

Runs on http://localhost:8001.

To also run the async workers (needed for emails):

# In separate terminals
npm run dev:worker       # handles OTP and generic emails
npm run dev:reminder     # handles stale job reminder emails

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Runs on http://localhost:5173. The Vite dev server proxies /api/* to http://localhost:8001.

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Environment variables

# backend/.env

PORT=8001
NODE_ENV=development

MONGO_URI=mongodb://localhost:27017/taskify

REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379
RABBITMQ_URL=amqp://localhost:5672

JWT_SECRET=something-long-and-random
JWT_EXPIRES_IN=7d

EMAIL_USER=your-gmail@gmail.com
EMAIL_PASS=your-gmail-app-password   # use a Gmail App Password, not your account password

CORS_ORIGINS=http://localhost:5173

For the frontend, create frontend/.env.local:

VITE_BACKEND_URL=        # leave empty for local (proxy handles it)
                         # set to your deployed backend URL in production

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API overview

All responses follow { success: true, data: T }. Errors return { success: false, message: string }.

POST   /api/auth/register
POST   /api/auth/login
POST   /api/auth/logout
GET    /api/auth/me
POST   /api/auth/forgot-password
POST   /api/auth/reset-password

GET    /api/jobs
POST   /api/jobs
PATCH  /api/jobs/:jobId
DELETE /api/jobs/:jobId

GET    /api/tasks
POST   /api/tasks
PATCH  /api/tasks/:taskId
DELETE /api/tasks/:taskId

GET    /api/templates
POST   /api/templates
PATCH  /api/templates/:templateId
DELETE /api/templates/:templateId
POST   /api/templates/seed-defaults

GET    /api/companies/search?q=<name>

GET    /api/health

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Project structure

backend/src/
├── app.js                  # Express app setup, middleware, routes
├── server.js               # Connects to all services, starts listening
├── config/                 # env validation, database connection, cookie options
├── controllers/            # Route handlers (auth, jobs, tasks, templates, companies)
├── middleware/             # JWT auth, global error handler
├── models/                 # Mongoose schemas (User, Job, Task, Template, Otp)
├── routes/                 # Express routers
├── services/               # Redis client, RabbitMQ client, Nodemailer
├── jobs/                   # staleJobReminder.js — the daily cron
├── workers/                # emailWorker.js, reminderWorker.js — queue consumers
├── types/                  # Zod schemas for all request bodies
└── utils/                  # AppError class, JWT helpers

frontend/src/
├── lib/api.ts              # All API calls, TypeScript interfaces for every model
├── pages/                  # Dashboard, Jobs, Tasks, Templates, Login, etc.
├── components/             # Shared UI — TaskDialog, JobDialog, Layout, etc.
└── components/ui/          # shadcn/ui primitives

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Deployment

The backend is deployed on Render (Singapore), the frontend on Vercel.

A few things worth noting if you're deploying:

• Don't set PORT manually in Render — it injects it automatically. Setting it yourself means the app listens on a different port than Render expects, and it'll show "No open ports detected".
• Upstash Redis requires rediss:// (double-s, TLS), not redis://.
• If your MongoDB Atlas password contains @, URL-encode it as %40 in the connection string.
• Set CORS_ORIGINS to your Vercel URL without a trailing slash.