# Vehicle Cost Estimator (Service) 

This is a side project I created to learn the basics of web scraping with Puppeteer. 
However, the vehicle selection data is incomplete and only includes years from 1992 to 2024.

It uses Puppeteer to search Edmunds for similar vehicles, allowing users to get an idea of how much other vehicles are selling for.

As of 10/12/2024, the vehicle selection endpoints and estimation functions are working.

This project is a back-end application built with Express, React, and TypeScript. 
It serves as the service for a vehicle cost estimator simulator and is designed to work with the vehicle-sim-react-client repository.

## Features

- ⚡ **Express** - Fast, optimized bundling and development.
- ⚛️ **React** - Efficient UI building.
- 💅 **SCSS** - Built-in support for SCSS for styling.
- 🤖 **Puppeteer** - Web scraping and automation for data extraction.


## Future Features

- 🚗 **Enhanced Vehicle Data** - Add trim selection and integration with more comprehensive vehicle data sources.
- 📊 **Advanced Analytics** - Vehicle loan calculator along with more vehicle statistics like resale and number still on the road/registered
- 📱 **Mobile Compatibility** - Improved compatibility with mobile devices.
- 🔄 **Convert to TypeScript** - Convert the entire codebase to TypeScript for better type safety and maintainability.

### Prerequisites

Ensure Node.js and npm are installed on your machine. Download [here](https://nodejs.org/).

### Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   ```bash
   git clone https://github.com/Japapino/vehicle-sim-node-server.git
   cd vehicle-sim-node-server
   ```
2. Install dependencies
    ```bash
    npm install
    ```
    2a. First run through requires import of vehicle make and model data
    ```bash
    npm import
    ```
3. Start application
    ```bash
    npm run start
    ```
4. Start node server (see vehicle-sim-react-client repo)

### Related Repositories

vehicle-sim-react-client: The React client that to be used in conjunction with this microservice.