alsterholm / music-mashup

Music Mashup

Description

This application is a Mashup of three API:s: MusicBrainz, Wikipedia and Cover Art Archive.

The application is a simple express app that exposes a single endpoint to fetch information about artists. The application is using Redis in order to cache responses from the API:s to reduce the amount of external calls, both to make the application faster and to avoid being rate limited.

Error handling is very basic right now. The way it works is that the route handler for the endpoint is wrapped within a try/catch block, and if anything goes wrong the application will respond with a 404 error. There are numerous ways to expand upon this, such as adding validation to make sure the mbid supplied is formatted like an actual UUID.

Another thing to keep in mind is that dependencies are created and injected into services in the entry point file. If the application would grow, it would make sense to create (or use a package for) a service container, to make things cleaner.

Requirements

Node.js v8.0+, Redis

Installation

Environment variables

Create an .env file in the root of the project containing the following keys:

PORT=3000

REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
REDIS_PORT=6379
REDIS_PASSWORD=

It is possible to run the application without the .env file, and the defaults (as shown above) will be used.

Dependencies

Run npm install to install the dependencies.

Instructions

To run the application, run npm run start.

The application only contains one endpoint: GET /artists/:mbid. MBID:s can be found on MusicBrainz. The endpoint will return a JSON object containing information about the artist, a description and a list of albums. Each album is represented by an object containing the album's id, title and a URL to the album's cover art.

Example response for GET localhost:3000/artists/40a10c54-06a1-46ad-9161-53e989c4ca95:

{
    "mbid": "40a10c54-06a1-46ad-9161-53e989c4ca95",
    "name": "Young Guns",
    "description": "<p><b>Young Guns</b> are an English alternative rock band from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The members, working with each other in various musical interests throughout the 2000s, formally formed the band in 2008, and rose to prominence after their debut EP, <i>Mirrors</i>, earned them spots opening live shows for Bon Jovi and Guns N' Roses. Their debut album, <i>All Our Kings Are Dead</i>, on 12 July 2010. Their second album, <i>Bones</i>, was released in February 2012. Their single \"Bones\" reached no. 1 on the <i>Billboard</i> Active Rock charts in the US in May 2013. Their third album, <i>Ones and Zeros</i>, was released on 9 June 2015. The band's fourth album, <i>Echoes</i>, was released on September 16, 2016.</p>\n<p></p>",
    "albums": [
        {
            "id": "16b4cf5c-07f2-432f-a435-8d3b4fd0d85b",
            "image": "http://coverartarchive.org/release/11d2b122-f654-4a17-933f-705fd3cd3d7b/14355798671.jpg",
            "title": "Echoes"
        },
        {
            "id": "2a72a69a-f780-4071-b919-21ba19f742b6",
            "image": "http://coverartarchive.org/release/d61c04d5-8a37-419b-9ab0-05c48e64cf2d/5374518058.jpg",
            "title": "All Our Kings Are Dead"
        },
        {
            "id": "90843167-903f-4ecb-ad4f-9005504d2a83",
            "image": "http://coverartarchive.org/release/d06d1be8-edd9-41dd-87b3-0ae381dfcc24/1559610373.jpg",
            "title": "Bones"
        },
        {
            "id": "bd083fb6-b6b4-42c0-84c8-a47f706d9932",
            "image": "http://coverartarchive.org/release/1e0dd455-7fd4-4da0-ad88-65c52ecf8458/12543195022.jpg",
            "title": "Ones and Zeros"
        }
    ]
}