leon-northcoders / nc-news-be

Back-end REST API for the NC-News web app

NORTHCODERS NEWS API

This project provides access to Northcoders news, articles, users and comments.

Getting started

Link below displays all of the available API Endpoints

• Link to NC-News API - https://nc-news-leon-be.herokuapp.com

Prerequisites

This application was built with JavaScript and uses:

• Node.js - JavaScript run-time environment
• Express - Web framework
• mongoose - MongoDB object modelling
• EJS - Javascript templating language
• faker.js - Generate data for seed files
• Lodash - JavaScript utility library
• Mocha - JavaScript test framework
• Chai - Node assertion library
• SuperTest - HTTP assertion library
• Nodemon - Monitors for changes and automatially restarts server

Installation

You will need to have Node installed before installing other dependencies. Information on how to do this can be found at the Node website.

1. Download a copy of the project through GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/leon-northcoders/NC-News-BE.git

2. Download the necessary dependencies:

npm i

Config

Before proceeding, you will need to create a config directory within the root of the project. It is recommended to use a different file for test, production and development node environments, with each exporting the URL location of your MongoDB database.

1. Create config file for each node environment, exporting the corresponding URL

exports.DB_URL = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/northcoders_news_test'

2. Create index.js which exports necessary config file depending on node environment

process.env.NODE_ENV = process.env.NODE_ENV || 'dev'
module.exports = require(`./${process.env.NODE_ENV}`)

Running the tests

The test suite is built with the Mocha test framework, including Chai and Supertest.

There are 31 written tests in the spec folder. To execute the test suite:

npm t

Running the app in localhost

1. To run server locally:

npm run dev

2. To access your app within a browser or Postman, visit:

http://localhost:9090/

3. From there you can browse a list of all of the available API endpoints.

Seeding the databases

1. To seed the development database:

npm run seed:dev

2. To seed the production database on Mlab:

npm run seed:prod