News API

About this API

This is a backend API server which serves a news website. It's written in node.js and fully tested with the Jest testing framework,and was built as a project for the backend part of the Northcoders coding bootcamp. It provides several endpoints and you can read a description of these endpoints at: this Hosted version api .

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Setup

If you would like to further develop or locally run this project you will need to carry out these following steps:

1 - Cloning

Clone this repo to your local machine.

2 - Installation

Install the packages by typing npm i in your terminal. This should install the following packages:

    "dotenv": "^16.0.0",
    "express": "^4.18.1",
    "jest-sorted": "^1.0.14",
    "pg": "^8.7.3",
    "supertest": "^6.2.3"

If there were any missing packages in your dependencies you will need to install them manually. You can do this by typing npm run missing-package

3 - Environment

First you need to install psql use the fowllowing commandees

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib
sudo -u postgres createuser --superuser $USER
sudo -u postgres createdb $USER

If you see the following error: role "username-here" already exists, it means that you already have a Postgres user so can move on to the next step.

If you see the following error: Cannot connect to database/server or similar, run

 sudo service postgresql start

to ensure that the postgresql server is running before trying the above again.

Then run this command to enter the terminal application for PostgreSQL:

psql

You may need to run the following command first to start the PostrgreSQL server in order for the psql command to work:

sudo service postgresql start

Now type:

ALTER USER username WITH PASSWORD 'mysecretword123';

BUT Instead of username type your Ubuntu username and instead of 'mysecretword123' choose your own password and be sure to wrap it in quotation marks. Use a simple password like 'password'. DONT USE YOUR LOGIN PASSWORD !

You can then exit out of psql by typing \q

Storing a Postgres password on Ubuntu.

cd
touch .pgpass
code .pgpass

Now each field can be a literal value or a wildcard: *. We just want to set a password so should add the following to your file (replacing 'mypassword' with your actual password that you created when you ran the ALTER USER command):

*:*:*:*:mypassword

Change the permissions on .pgpass

chmod 0600 ~/.pgpass

When you run psql it should now use this password as a default so you don't have to provide one on every command.

To make sure that the username you have registerd has been saved run

psql
\du

you should see it.

You will then need to set up your environment to connect to the desired database.

You can do this by creating .env.development and .env.test files.

In the .development file you need to assign the database to your data base name:

PGDATABASE=database_name_here

And then in your .test file:

PGDATABASE=database_name_here_test

There is a example file, .env-example, which provides an example of this. You do not need to add anything to this file.

The env file will be ignored and won't be pushed to github.

4 - Testing

To run the tests you need to install jest framework and supertest library which are used in this project:

npm i -D jest-sorted
npm i -D supertest

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5 - Running

Now you are all set up and ready to start building and testing your development. First though you will need to build and seed your database:

npm run setup-dbs
npm run seed

You are Good To Go!

Now to ensure everything works as it should, enter:

npm test

You should now be seeing 51 lovely green ticks which represent successful tests across 2 files.

Minimum verions

You need to upgrade Your node or psql if they are lower than:

Node v18.1.0
Psql 14.2

HAVE FUN :)