marianphillips / cinema-booking-api

Cinema Booking API

API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating software. Simply put, they allow two pieces of software to communicate with each other through a pre-defined interface.

Learning Objectives

• Design and build a database-backend API

Introduction

So far, we've designed a database structure for a cinema booking system and implemented that design using an ORM. The next step is to build an API that allows the cinema and its customers to interact with the database.

Frontend applications usually won't interact with a database directly, especially if it's a web app; they'll instead send instructions to a server which will process those instructions and give back a response. We decide how the server receives instructions, processes them and responds back by creating an API.

Setting up

The full database schema and seed file for this exercise has already been implemented, your focus is on building the API itself.

Note: Although we need to create a new primary database, we can reuse a shadow database across multiple projects since Prisma resets it after using it.

1. Create a new database instance in ElephantSQL.
2. Rename the .env.example file to .env
3. Edit the DATABASE_URL variable in .env, swapping YOUR_DATABASE_URL for the URL of the database you just created. Leave ?schema=prisma at the end.
4. Edit the SHADOW_DATABASE_URL variable in .env, swapping YOUR_SHADOW_DATABASE_URL for the URL of the shadow database you created in the earlier exercises. Leave ?schema=shadow at the end.
5. Run npm ci to install the project dependencies.
6. Run npx prisma migrate reset to execute the existing migrations & data seed. Press y when it asks if you're sure.

Instructions

• Run the app with npm start
• Work through each file in the requirements directory in numerical order

Testing your work

So far, you may have been using curl to test your API endpoints. You can continue to use this approach if you choose, or you can download a tool to make things a little easier. There are two main options:

• Insomnia (recommended)
• Postman

These tools are quite similar to your web browser but have some additional functionality to make structuring API requests easier.