Making a Post Route

[github-learning-lab]

So far, we have only made GET requests to our server. A POST request can send data securely through the request body. In order to make POST requests, first we need to include the "body-parser" library from our node_modules (included with express). Add these lines after the app variable:

const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
app.use(bodyParser.json());

Let's write a function to handle a POST request made to the 'login' endpoint, as if a user was trying to log in:

app.post('/login',function(req,res){
 	const username=req.body.username;
 	const password=req.body.password;
 
 	const mockUsername="billyTheKid";
 	const mockPassword="superSecret";
 
 	if (username===mockUsername && password===mockPassword){
      	res.json({
      	 	success: true,
      	 	message: 'password and username match!',
      	 	token: 'encrypted token goes here'
      	})
 	} else {
      	res.json({
      	 	success: false,
      	 	message: 'password and username do not match'
      	})
 	}
})

Your entire file should look like this now:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

app.use(bodyParser.json())

const mockUserData=[
	{name:'Mark'},
	{name:'Jill'}
]

app.get('/users',function(req,res){
	res.json({
		success: true,
		message: 'successfully got users. Nice!',
		users: mockUserData
	})
})
// colons are used as variables that be viewed in the params
app.get('/users/:id',function(req,res){
	console.log(req.params.id)
	res.json({
		success: true,
		message: 'got one user',
		user: req.params.id
	})
})

app.post('/login',function(req,res){
	// Typically passwords are encrypted using something like bcrypt before sending to database
	const username=req.body.username;
	const password=req.body.password;

	// This should come from the database
	const mockUsername="billyTheKid";
	const mockPassword="superSecret";

	if (username===mockUsername && password===mockPassword){
		// In practice, use JSON web token sign method here to make an encrypted token
		res.json({
			success: true,
			message: 'password and username match!',
			token: 'encrypted token goes here'
		})
	} else {
		res.json({
			success: false,
			message: 'password and username do not match'
		})
	}

})

app.listen(8000,function(){console.log('server is listening')})

Time to commit our changes!

git add server.js
git commit -m"add login POST route"
git push origin master