Turing Group Code Assessment

Installation

Prerequisites

This repository requires Node.js and MongoDB to be installed

Node.js

Node.js is JavaScript runtime environment, and is what runs this app. The installation package for Node.js can be found here Alternatively, Node.js can be installed from the command line on Ubuntu with

    curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
    sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

CLI instructions for other linux distributions can be found here

MongoDB

MongoDB is a database that will be persisting weather information for this app.

MongoDB can be installed on Mac from Homebrew:

    brew update
    brew install mongodb
    mkdir -p /data/db # make data directory
    sudo chown -R `id -un` /data/db # assign correct permissions to data directory

Treehouse provides a good tutorial for downloading and installing MongoDB on OSX

Mongo provides for installing MongoDB on linux here and on Windows here

Once MongoDB is installed, start the mongo server by running

    mongod

Installing the app

To install the weather app, open a terminal in the base directory of the app and enter the following commands

    npm install
    npm run build

Preparing the environment

This app uses dotenv to load environment variables. To set it up, create a .env file similar to the example.env file provided. This file contains your weather underground key to access the weather underground API. Alternatively, you can pass in the weather underground key as the environment variable WUND_API_KEY when starting the app

Running the app

Make sure that MongoDB is running. If it is not, start the mongo server by running

    mongod

Open a terminal in the base directory of the app and type

    node start

By default, the app will run on port 3000. You can modify this by setting the environment variable PORT or by adding PORT to the .env file.

To access the app, point your browser to http://localhost:3000. If you modified the port when starting the app, you will need to use that port number.

Thoughts

This app uses a React/Express/Mongo stack. I always try to use the right tool for the job, while keeping apps as light as possible. In this app, I am frustrated with how bloated things got. In the end I had 56 mb worth of node modules for a 1.7 mb app. It's not a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either.

React: React was definitely overkill. If this app was only ever going to display 3 days of weather, something lighter (like jQuery or Angular) would have worked. But I like React, so I went with it. The down side is that it required pulling in webpack and babel, and my use of React ended up adding 7 node modules to the package.
Express: I'm happy with Express, it works great for both large and small servers.
Mongo: As far as databases go, MongoDB works well because of its support for unstructured data. Trying to force the Weather Underground response into a SQL table would have been a huge pain. In an early iteration, I was using in-memory storage, but I figured persisting to the disk was something that was important. The in-memory storage can found here

ajstocchetti / turingGroupAssessment