MishTails / W10D3P2

Long Practice: America's Largest Trees

In this practice, you will build an API which relies on both SQL and Express.

Getting started

Download starter. cd into server folder, and install dependencies using npm install.

Start the Express server in development mode using npm run dev.

Open Postman, and create a new GET query to the local express server: http://localhost:5000/

You should see this response:

{
  "message": "API server is running"
}

Explore the existing code

Open server/app.js and notice...

• The framework of this project has been created for you.
• The dotenv package has been installed and configured, so you can use environment variables.
• This application is a basic Express server configured as an API, so it is able to handle JSON in the requests and responses.
• There is one router in the application, which serves up paths that start with /trees.
• The / path returns a successful response that the server is running
• The Express server includes error handling middleware to return an error message in a JSON response object. This means you can call next(err) from any route when an error occurs.
• The Express server handles an unknown route with a JSON response (rather than the default HTML).

Open server/package.json and notice...

• The sqlite3 package was added to the project. This means it was installed when you ran npm install, so you will not need to add it.

Close both server/app.js and server/package.json since no changes will be made to these files.

Phases

This project has been broken down into phases. After completing the first two phases - SQL setup and the first Express phase - you can proceed in any order through the remaining Express phases.

Complete as much as you can in the time allotted. You can complete any remaining phases for additional practice during assessment prep.

If you get stuck on phase 3 or higher, try moving on to the next phase for now, then come back later in the project to complete or improve your code. Also, you can formulate good questions, and reach out to your instructors for help.