vutagwa-m/We-connect

Hotspot billing system powered by nextjs, cloudflare, and intergrated with mikrotik and tenda AP # We-Connect — Wi-Fi & TV Captive Billing Engine **Gecab Systems Ltd** This is a real billing system that moves real customer money through a live M-Pesa Till/Paybill and controls real network access on a production MikroTik router. Follow this guide in order — don't skip the testing steps before flipping `MPESA_ENV=production`. --- ## 0. What you're deploying - Windows PC/mini-PC running Node.js + Docker Desktop, on the same network as the MikroTik router (or reachable to it). - PostgreSQL + Redis in Docker containers (billing records + fast session cache). - A Next.js app: customer-facing captive portal + payment API + M-Pesa webhook receiver, publicly reachable over HTTPS (Safaricom will not call an HTTP or LAN-only callback URL). - A MikroTik router (RouterOS v7.1+) as the enforcement point. --- ## 1. Prerequisites 1. **Windows 10/11 Pro or Server**, with virtualization enabled in BIOS (Docker Desktop needs it). 2. **Docker Desktop for Windows** — install from docker.com, set the backend to **WSL2** (Settings → General → "Use the WSL 2 based engine"), and set it to **start on login** (Settings → General) so all containers come back up after a reboot. This is the only thing that's actually required to run the app now — Node.js itself runs *inside* the containers, not on Windows directly. **Store the project inside the WSL2 filesystem**, not on a Windows drive (`C:\...`) — e.g. clone/unzip it under `\\wsl$\Ubuntu\home\ \we-connect` or directly from within a WSL terminal. Bind-mounting a folder that lives on the Windows NTFS side into a Linux container goes through a translation layer that's noticeably slower and can miss file-change events, which shows up as "I edited the file but hot-reload didn't pick it up." Keeping the project inside WSL2 avoids that entirely. 3. **Node.js 18.18+ LTS** — optional. Only needed on the host if you want to run one-off commands outside Docker (e.g. generating a secret with `node -e ...`, or running `npm run dev` directly ins …