RealtyLink PH

A real-estate marketplace for the Philippines — PRC-verified agents, reviewed listings, 360° virtual tours, real-time buyer↔agent chat, and an AI assistant that answers buyers while an agent is offline.

• Backend — Laravel 12 REST API + Reverb websockets (realtylinkph-backend)
• Frontend — Nuxt 4 / Vue 3 SPA (realtylinkph-frontend)
• Database — PostgreSQL

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Running it on another machine

1. Prerequisites

Tool	Version	Notes
PHP	8.2+	with openssl pdo_pgsql pgsql mbstring fileinfo curl zip sodium
Composer	2.x
Node.js	20+
PostgreSQL	14+
Git	any

PHP extensions matter. Check with php -m. If pdo_pgsql is missing the app cannot reach the database at all. On Windows, uncomment the matching extension= lines in php.ini — the standalone Windows build of PHP ships no php.ini at all, so you may need to copy php.ini-development to php.ini first.

PHP also needs a CA bundle on Windows, or every outbound HTTPS call fails with cURL error 60 — that silently breaks Google sign-in, Gemini, Groq, Geoapify and email all at once. Download https://curl.se/ca/cacert.pem and point php.ini at it:

curl.cainfo    = "C:\php\extras\ssl\cacert.pem"
openssl.cafile = "C:\php\extras\ssl\cacert.pem"

Two more php.ini values, or listing-photo uploads fail confusingly:

upload_max_filesize = 12M
post_max_size       = 20M

2. Clone

git clone https://github.com/codex0315-oss/realtylinkph.git
cd realtylinkph

3. Database

createdb realtylinkph          # or: CREATE DATABASE realtylinkph; in psql

4. Backend

cd realtylinkph-backend
composer install
cp .env.example .env           # Windows: copy .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate

Open .env and fill in at minimum:

• DB_PASSWORD — your local Postgres password
• REVERB_APP_ID, REVERB_APP_KEY, REVERB_APP_SECRET — any random strings
• GROQ_API_KEY / GEMINI_API_KEY — for the AI features
• GEOAPIFY_KEY — for maps
• GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID / GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET — for "Continue with Google"

Everything else has a working default. For email, MAIL_MAILER=log writes messages to storage/logs/laravel.log instead of sending them — fine for dev.

Then:

php artisan migrate --seed
php artisan storage:link       # makes uploaded photos reachable at /storage/...

5. Frontend

cd ../realtylinkph-frontend
npm install
cp .env.example .env           # Windows: copy .env.example .env

⚠️ NUXT_PUBLIC_REVERB_KEY must equal the backend's REVERB_APP_KEY, and the host/port must match too. If they differ, everything still loads but real-time chat, typing indicators and notifications quietly stop working.

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Starting the app

Four processes. Use four terminals (or a tool like concurrently):

# 1 — API
cd realtylinkph-backend && php artisan serve

# 2 — websockets (real-time chat + notifications)
cd realtylinkph-backend && php artisan reverb:start

# 3 — queue worker (emails, AI auto-replies)
cd realtylinkph-backend && php artisan queue:listen

# 4 — frontend
cd realtylinkph-frontend && npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Why queue:listen and not queue:work

queue:work loads your PHP classes once at startup and never re-reads them, so after any backend edit it keeps running the old code — jobs then fail with confusing "undefined method" errors. queue:listen boots a fresh process per job, so it always runs current code. Slightly slower per job; irrelevant locally.

Optional: the scheduler

cd realtylinkph-backend && php artisan schedule:work

Runs two hourly jobs: the homepage ranking refresh, and deleting the documents of rejected agent applications once their re-apply cooldown lapses. The app works without it; those two just don't happen on their own.

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Test accounts

php artisan migrate --seed creates accounts that all share the password password123:

Role	Email
Admin	[email protected]

The seeder prints the rest when it runs.

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Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause
could not find driver	pdo_pgsql not enabled in php.ini
cURL error 60 on Google / AI / email	No CA bundle — see Prerequisites
Messages only appear after a refresh	Reverb not running, or the Reverb key/host differ between the two .env files
Emails and AI replies never happen	No queue worker running
Photo upload fails with no clear error	upload_max_filesize / post_max_size too low in php.ini
Blank page after npm run dev	Frontend .env missing — copy it from .env.example

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A note on what is not in this repo

By design, none of these are committed:

• .env files — they hold the DB password, Google OAuth secret, SMTP password and the AI/map API keys. Use .env.example as your template.
• Database dumps (*.sql) — they contain real user emails and password hashes.
• storage/app/public/ — uploaded listing photos and, more importantly, agents' government IDs, licence cards and live face scans. A fresh clone starts with empty upload folders, which is correct.