Stockdash is a simple application for managing the selection and review of individual stocks for investment. It's built primarily using Laravel.

I built it because I was tired of managing multiple different sources of information and wrangling tools in order to "process" individual names and keep a log of my past interactions with them. If you're interested, you can see the initial list of user stories I wrote for this project here.

You'll need a server/VM setup that supports Laravel and Node.js - an overview of required software is here. We use the excellent Homestead environment setup that's custom tailored to run Laravel really nicely out of the box. You can definitely do the same thing - just follow the instructions here.

After your VM is setup, clone the repository into your desired directory on your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/gardnersmitha/stockdash.git MyStockdashApp

Change into your new project directory:

cd MyStockdashApp

Install PHP dependencies via composer:

composer install

Install other package dependencies via npm:

npm install

If you have any issues, a more comprehensive Laravel installation guide can be found here.

There are a couple of configuration tasks that need to be completed in order for the app to run.

First, you will need to create a .env file in the root of your project directory. A sample file called .env.example is included with the repository. The easiest way to get started is to simply copy the contents of this file into a newly created .env file, and edit from there.

The very first line of the .env file contains a variable called APP_KEY - this is an install-specific 32-byte key that Laravel uses for a number of functions. Laravel's artisan command suite provides a convenient way generate a key for your project.

From your project directory, run the following command:

php artisan key:generate

Second, you'll want to make sure your database gets all set up and happy. Assuming you have your DB user and pass configured correctly in your .env file, this should be pretty quick and easy thanks to Laravel's migrations:

php artisan migrate

That's it. You should be abie to view a working version of stockdash in your browser.

//TODO write feature docs