Implementation Plan: Deploy to Hosting

Date: 2025-10-15 Spec: spec.md

1. Technical Context

This feature enables the application to be deployed to a public-facing host. The core of this work involves externalizing configuration from code to environment variables and ensuring the backend's Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy is configurable.

Backend: The Node.js/Express backend will use the cors middleware to validate incoming request origins against a configurable whitelist provided by the CORS_ORIGIN environment variable.
Frontend: The React frontend will fetch the backend URL from a REACT_APP_API_URL environment variable, making it easy to target different backends.
Deployment: The root docker-compose.yaml will be modified to inject these environment variables into the respective containers using env_file.

2. Constitution Check

I. Defined Technology Stack: Adheres to Node.js, React, and Docker.
II. UI/UX Consistency: No UI changes are required.
III. Container-First Development: The solution is built entirely around enhancing the existing Docker-based workflow.
IV. Test-Driven Development (TDD): New tests will be required to validate the CORS configuration logic and error handling.
V. API-First Design: No API changes are made, but the accessibility of the API is modified, which is consistent with this principle.

Result: All constitutional principles are upheld.

3. Implementation Phases

Phase 0: Research & Decisions

Research focused on confirming the standard practices for configuration management in the existing tech stack.

Outcome: All technical decisions have been documented.
Artifact: research.md

Phase 1: Design & Contracts

This phase defines the developer-facing instructions and confirms that no data or API contract changes are necessary.

Data Model: No changes are required.
- Artifact: data-model.md
API Contracts: No changes are required.
- Artifact: contracts/README.md
Developer Quickstart: Instructions for configuring the environment for deployment have been created.
- Artifact: quickstart.md

Phase 2: Implementation Tasks

(This section will be filled out by the /speckit.tasks command.)

4. Validation Plan

Unit Tests: Add backend tests to verify that the CORS middleware correctly allows whitelisted origins and rejects others.
Integration Tests: An E2E test will be created to simulate a deployment with a custom domain, ensuring the frontend can connect to the backend without CORS errors.
Manual Tests: Follow the quickstart.md guide to perform a full deployment and verify all functionality.

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