Hacker News API

Hacker News API is organized around REST. The API accepts form-encoded/json request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs.

This API is a mirror to the real Hacker News API with updated fields for some of the resources. It also provides new endpoints for accessing resources that aren't provided in the real HN API.

Link to Hosted demo

To run the API

first clone this repo to your machine

git clone git@github.com:Build-Week-HN/BE-John.git

then change the directory to the project directory

cd BE-John

then move to the develop branch git checkout develop

• install dependencies

  npm install

Running the app locally

create a .env file and add the following environment variables

DB_ENV=development

DB_URL=postgres://<user>:<password>@localhost:5432/<db-name>

Ensure you have postresql installed

Create a database using postresql and fill the DB_URL above with appropriate values.

Create the database tables and seed them with some initial data

npx knex migrate:latest

npx seed:run

Run the application

npm run server

Authentication

To use the API, you have to be signed up and/or logged in. The API uses JWT tokens to secure endpoints.

To register, use the following endpoint

`<host>/api/auth/register`

host, here, can either be the localhost(127.0.0.1), if you are running the app locally or the heroku root where the API is hosted.

you will be required to supply your username and password.

{
	username: <username>,
	password: <password>
}

To obtain the token use the following endpoint

    `<host>/api/auth/login`

the response is a json formatted output containing a token that will be used for authentication.

After authentication, use the token to access all the protected endpoints by providing the token in the authorization header of a request object.

Testing the API endpoints

The project implements the following endpoints

Method	API Endpoint	Description
GET	/stories	Displays a list of all stories
POST	/stories	Creates a new story
GET	/stories/:id	Display one story
DELETE	/stories/:id	Deletes a story
PUT	/stories/:id	Edits a story
GET	/stories/:id/comments	Displays all comments for a story
POST	/stories/:id/comments	Adds a comment to a story
GET	/stories/:id/comments/:id	Displays a story's comment
DELETE	/stories/:id/comments/:id	Deletes a story's comment
PUT	/stories/:id/comments/:id	Edits a story's comment

The endpoints can be tested using Postman, HTTPie (a command line http client), or curl or Insomnia etc.

Sample payload for testing

Below is a sample payload you can use to test the stories endpoint.

{
  "title" : "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive",
  "url" : "http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html"
}

Testing Using Postman

With the project running locally, use the Postman service to test the endpoints by prepending each endpoint in the table above to the base url http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/.

For endpoints that require user/client input, Postman provides an easy to use graphical interface for supplying the values as key-value pairs in a header and for adding JSON data. It also has an easy to use authentication field where the token can pasted into before a request is made.

Documentation

View the documentation here