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bradtraversy/proshop_mern
Shopping cart built with MERN & Redux
A MERN stack e-commerce tutorial project from Brad Traversy's Udemy course, covering cart, orders, PayPal checkout, and basic admin. Explicitly deprecated — the author has released a Redux Toolkit rewrite (proshop-v2) and recommends using that instead. If you clone this, you're inheriting 2020-era patterns.
The scope is well-chosen for learning: it hits the full e-commerce loop (browse, cart, checkout, payment, admin) without bloating into a real product. The backend is clean Express with proper middleware separation — auth, error handling, and routes are all where you'd expect them. ES Modules on the backend (not CommonJS) was a forward-looking choice for a 2020 project. PayPal SDK integration is included and wired to a real checkout flow, which most MERN tutorials skip.
Deprecated and frozen — last touched January 2024 and the author's own README tells you not to use it. The JWT secret in the sample env is literally 'abc123', and there's no guidance on real secret management. Classic Redux with action/constant/reducer files for every entity is exactly the boilerplate that Redux Toolkit was created to eliminate; the v2 rewrite exists precisely because this structure doesn't scale or age well. No tests anywhere — unit, integration, or e2e — which is a bad habit to absorb from a learning project.