zbarovsky / bounty-client

Daring to Decouple

We want to hook up our Bounty hunter server to a front end. What do we need to do to accomplish this? Let's plan it out.

Step one: look at the code you've got

Let's look at the code you've been given. What is it doing?

Step two: setting up the server

CORS

Because we have a decoupled app, we aren't able to access our bounty server without allowing Cross-origin Reference Sharing. Open up your bounty server and let't fix that.

Install cors

Run npm i cors to install the cors module. If you haven't already, also install dotenv and require it at the top of your server.js (or whatever you named your entry-point).

The easy way to impliment cors

We could fix this super quick by simply requiring cors, then app.useing it.

...
const cors = require('cors');

app.use(cors())

The benefit of this method is that it's quick. The downside of this method is that it allows ANY site to make a call to this API. For an open API like the Kanye Rest API, this is a good thing! But since our employers are super secretive, we want to be able to restrict which origins can query this API.

One origin allowed

If we want to allow one origin to access our API, we can add some configuration to our cors.

const cors = require('cors')

app.use(cors({
  "origin": process.env.CLIENT_URL
}))

Future thinking

You can look at the cors docs to impliment other configurations that allow you to:

• Allow CORS only on certain routes (it functions the same as our isLoggedIn middleware from express auth)
• Allow CORS from multiple origins (good if you have different clients calling this API: think paid service)

JSON

Since we're using a react app, we need to tell our express app that our body might be json (as opposed to x-www-form-urlencoded). RIght under where we import the middleware that handles form data, we're going to add one line:

app.use(express.json())

.env

We're gonna be sneaky and hide our approved CORS origin in our .env, so let's add it into our .env. While we're at it, let's change our port to be 3001 so we don't conflict with our react server.

Step 3: Client Side

to do list

• set up server base url in our .env
• make sure we can get info from our server
• pass all dem deets into our BountyCard component
• Link our NewBounty form page
• write form handlers
• Impliment a delete button