nevehallon / fef-udacimeals-backbone-server

Back-end server for use with Udacity's Front-End Frameworks course

Back-End Server for Udacity's Front-End Frameworks course

This server provides support for the Front-End Frameworks coding labs. It both serves the app files and provides a REST interface for reading and storing data.

Running the server

The binaries directory contains builds for Windows, Mac OS X ("darwin"), and Linux. Run the appropriate server program to start the server, supplying the --www= flag to point to your front-end code (e.g. on Mac OS X use ./server_darwin_amd64 --www=../../FEF-UdaciMeals-Backbone)

Use the --log flag to see all of the incoming and outgoing traffic from the server.

Server details

The server serves web files and provides a REST API. The --wwwflag specifies the directory to be served as / (e.g. ./main --www=../web-files serves ../web-files/index.html as /index.html)

The server implements a REST API at /api/items:

• GET /api/items (no trailing slash) returns an object with a JSON array of menu items
• PUT /api/items is disallowed (you cannot put the whole array at once)
• GET /api/items/[id] (e.g. GET /api/items/strawberry-shortcake) gets the menu item with the specified ID and returns it as JSON
• PUT /api/items/[:id] takes a menu item (JSON format, in the body) and updates the existing item if the ID exists or appends a new one if the ID doesn't exist yet

All of the data is stored in JSON format in the _data directory. menu.json is the storage file. (The file at server/assets/menu.json provides the starting values and is compiled into the server binary.)

Building and running

If you want to modify the code or build for another platform:

1. Download and install the Go programming language
2. Download or clone this project
3. Change into the server directory
4. Compile the server: go build
5. Run the server program to start the server.

You can also use the compile.sh script to cross-compile for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

If you want to change the initial data file, install the rice tool from https://github.com/GeertJohan/go.rice, edit server/assets/menu.json, and follow the directions for using embed-go before re-building the binary.