Full-Stack E-Commerce App - Part 1: Project setup

Hey! Welcome to Part 1 of this series, where we build a complete, production-ready e-commerce app called ShopFlow — from an empty folder all the way to a live site on AWS. By the end of this series, ShopFlow will have: User authentication with JWT tokens A product catalogue with search powered by Elasticsearch A shopping cart (stored in Redis) and a full order system AI features — smart search, a chatbot, and product descriptions generated by AI Real payments via Stripe and PayPal Event-driven order processing with Apache Kafka Deployed on AWS with Kubernetes and a CI/CD pipeline That sounds like a lot — and it is! But we are going to build it one piece at a time. Each part of this series focuses on one thing, explains why we are doing it, and by the end, you have working code. In this first part, we just focus on getting everything set up. By the end of this post, your backend and frontend will be running, talking to each other, and you'll understand what every piece does. This series