Ula

Derived from Tamil word

உலா : Ulā

verb: To commute

Ula is a ride sharing application for people commuting to and from the same workplace. The app intelligently lists colleagues travelling on the path intersecting with passengers requesting for ride. Authentication is using office ID so that the app stays internal to the organizations and the rides are scheduled only with colleagues of the same org.

Project is written using nodeJS , to build the project run npm install and to run it locally, use npm run serve

Project setup

• The code is written in Vue.js and uses Ionic for the UI components.
• MySQL db is used to store the data and the backend is written in node.js using express.js framework.
• Ula uses Google Maps API to get the location and distance between the users.
• It automatically suggests the pilots to the passenger if their route to or from work intersects with the passengers base location.
• Ula provides flexibility to the pilots to accept or reject the ride requests based on their convenience, also it provides choice to the passengers to choose the pilot.

To build apk to run on android, follow the following steps:

1: Install Ionic

Ensure you have Node.js and npm installed. Then, install Ionic globally.

npm install -g @ionic/cli

2: Initialize Ionic in Your Vue.js App

Navigate to your Vue.js project directory in this case "ula" and initialize an Ionic project within it.

cd UI
ionic init

Follow the prompts to initialize Ionic in your existing Vue.js app.

3: Add Android Platform

Add the Android platform to your Ionic project. We're using capacitor to build on android platform.

npm install @capacitor/cli @capacitor/core @capacitor/android
npx cap init ula com.example.ula

4: Install and configure android-sdk

Make sure the sdkmanager binary is used to accept all lisence terms.

6: Build node project using npm install

5: Build the Android APK

npm run build
ionic build

6: To build apk using gradle, use the commands

npx cap add android # to add android platform to capacitor
cd android
export ANDROID_HOME=/usr/lib/android-sdk/ # Android home location pointing to android-sdk
./gradlew assembleDebug # to build debug apk for testing
./gradlew assembleRelease # to build release apk for production

This command will generate the APK file in the UI/android/app/build/outputs/apk/ directory.

The build apk can be copied over to a virtual device/simulator on IDE of choice or an android device to be installed and used.