Northcoders News - Backend Project

Welcome to Northcoders News!

Please note this was part of a coding bootcamp, I have not worked on the code since Oct 2018 and will instead leave it as it was when I was learning so that I can show progression in how far I have come since starting to code

A RESTful API made using MongoDB, Mongoose, Node.js and Express.js.

Northcoders News is a news aggregator which has articles divided by topic; each article has comments which can be added to or deleted by the user who posts them and votes which can be incrememented or decremented.

The API has been deployed by Heroku and can be found at https://nc-news33.herokuapp.com/ (Doesn't fully work, only shows page with endpoints)

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

There are a few things you will need in order to install the API, these are listed below.

General:

A text editor e.g. VS Code, Sublime, Atom etc
A Linux terminal e.g. Terminator
npm package manager (comes with node.js) Installation instructions
MongoDB v4.0 for the database Docs and information
Postman for testing endpoints Download information

Dependencies you will need:

Mongoose v5.0.14 Installation Instructions
body-parser v1.15.2 Installation Instructions
Node.js v8.1.0 Installation Instructions
Express.js v4.16.3 Installation Instructions

Dev Dependencies you will need:

Mocha v5.0.5 Installation Instructions
Chai v4.1.2 library Installation Instructions
Nodemon v1.17.4 Installation Instructions
Supertest v3.0.0 Installation Instructions

Installing

A step by step series of examples that tell you how to get a development env running

Get this Repository

Fork this repository and clone it so you have your own local copy
cd into the folder you want to save the copy to e.g. cd Documents/myprojects and run the git clone command in your terminal

$ git clone https://github.com/HorrorOfPartyBeach/BE2-northcoders-news

Run cd BE2-northcoders-news and then npm install

Install MongoDB

Install MongoDB, if you don't already have it installed, by running the following:

$ sudo apt -y install mongodb

Open a new terminal window and run the command mongod, it should say waiting for connections on port 27017... at the bottom - you can run leave the mongod window running in the background.

Install required dependencies

Open the folder in VS Code (or another editor) and install dependencies by running the following command:

$ npm install

Make a config folder in the root folder and within that, a config.js file by running the commands below

$ mkdir config
$ touch config.js

Use the below boilerplate config in your config.js

const NODE_ENV = process.env.NODE_ENV || 'development'

const config = {
  development: {
    DB_URL: 'mongodb://localhost:27017/nc_news'
  },
  test: {
    DB_URL: 'mongodb://localhost:27017/nc_news_test'
    }
};

module.exports = config[NODE_ENV];

Seed the database

You can seed the database by running npm run seed:dev in your terminal.

Endpoints and Examples

To use endpoints, follow the steps below:

Ensure mongod is running in one terminal

Run npm run dev in another terminal, it should state:

[nodemon] 1.17.4
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching: *.*
[nodemon] starting `node index.js`
listening on port 9090
mongodb://localhost:27017/nc_news

Open the Postman app and make a request as per the documentation; the request url will be localhost:9090/ followed by an appropriate endpoint path e.g. localhost:9090/api/articles.

The available endpoints are listed in the table below:

Endpoint	Path
HTML page listing available endpoints	GET /api
Get all the users	GET /api/users
Get user by ID	GET /api/users/:username --- e.g: `/api/users/mitch123`
Get all topics	GET /api/topics
Get all articles for a single topic	GET /api/topics/:topic_slug/articles --- e.g: `/api/topics/football/articles`
Add a new article to a topic	POST /api/topics/:topic_slug/articles --- e.g: `{ "title": "new article", "body": "This is my new article content", "created_by": "user_id goes here"}`
Get all articles	GET /api/articles
Get article by ID	GET /api/articles/:article_id --- e.g: `/api/articles/5b9ba40c8ed29146542ab7a4`
Get all comments for a single article	GET /api/articles/:article_id/comments --- e.g: `/api/articles/5b9ba40c8ed29146542ab7a4/comments`
Add a new comment to an article	POST /api/articles/:article_id/comments --- e.g: `{"body": "This is my new comment", "created_by": "user_id goes here"}`
Change the article votes - requires a vote up/down query	PATCH /api/articles/:article_id --- e.g: `/api/articles/5b9ba40c8ed29146542ab7a4?vote=up`
Change the comment votes - requires a vote up/down query	PATCH /api/comments/:comment_id --- e.g: `/api/comments/5b9ba40c8ed29146542ab7c8?vote=down`
Delete a comment	DELETE /api/comments/:comment_id

Running the tests

To run the tests, ensure you have run the mongod command in a separate terminal window and Mongo is connected on port 27017. Then run npm run test in a new window or the integrated terminal of your text editor.

What the tests are for

The tests use Supertest, Mocha and the Chai library to test the happy and unhappy paths for the various available endpoints. Some examples can by found below:

Test that the GET request returns an array of comments and a status 200 code

describe('/comments', () => {
        it('GET returns an array of comments and 200 status code', () => {
            return request.get('/api/comments')
                .expect(200)
                .then(res => {
                    expect(res.body.comments).to.have.length(comments.length);
                })
        })
    })

Test that a status 400 is returned if a required field is missing in a POST request

it('POST returns a 400 status and error message when a required field is missing', () => {
            return request.post(`/api/topics/cats/articles`)
                .send({
                    "title": "New title",
                    "body": "New article",
                    "belongs_to": "cats"
                })
                .expect(400)
                .then(res => {
                    expect(res.body.msg).to.equal('articles validation failed: created_by: Path `created_by` is required.');
                })
        })

Deployment

The API has been deployed by Heroku and can be found at https://nc-news33.herokuapp.com/

Built With

MongoDB - NoSQL database program
Mongoose - Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js
Node.js - Javascript run-time environment
Express.js - Web Application framework
mLab - Database-as-a-service
Heroku - Cloud Application Platform

Authors

Emma Gilmour - HorrorOfPartyBeach

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

The great tutors and course at Northcoders
A myriad of documentation

HorrorOfPartyBeach / Northcoders-News-BE