Bear's pocket

What's this app for

Bear's pocket is an application to store and visualize user's daily consumption data, meanwhile it can analyze and visulize the data to make data more readable and playful.

By developing this app, I'm aiming to learn how to model, generate, and store datasets with node, express.js and mangoDB; how to build own restful APIs; How to visualize data in fun and beautiful way; and ultimately how to design meaningful applications and experiences around this data.

The next step is learning React native and rebuild main function with react

Weekly goal

4/17-4/23

• 💥 Learn Test-Driven-Development and Behavior-Driven-Developement; Mocha--learn how to build application in more stable way.
• 🐝Visulize daily consumption by using Chart.js and amCharts
• 📘Learn react-native

4/24-4/30

• 📘Learn the structure of react-native

How to run the app

Set up the app (git repository&heroku app)

1. clone this repository locally
2. Run npm install to get all required libraries.

npm install

3. if you already set up a heroku app, set remote heroku app to the repository

git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:projuct name.git

if not, create a new heroku app

heroku create

NOTE: if it is your very FIRST time setting up a Heroku app, you will need to upload a public key to Heroku. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/6059231. As explained in that StackOverlow link, if you don't yet have a public key, you'll be prompted to add one.

heroku rename new-app-name
heroku open

Set up mangoDB database

4. Add MongoLabs Starter MongoDB to your heroku app:

heroku addons:create mongolab

If you log-in to your heroku dashboard at https://heroku.com, you'll now see this as an add-on. Click on the 'MongoLab' link to see your database.

5. Get the Heroku MongoLab connection string into an .env file.

heroku config --shell | grep MONGODB_URI >> .env

Your connection string to MongoDB will now be in a .env file now (go have a look at the .env file). Your app connects to this database in the app.js file:

app.db = mongoose.connect(process.env.MONGODB_URI);

Your .env file is a secret config file that holds key app variables like this MongoDB URI string, and other things like 3rd Party API secrets and keys. It is specified in the .gitignore file, which means the .env file will not be tracked by .git and not available for others to see on github (this is good).

Starting the Server

6. Now it's ready to go!! Run npm start to start the server

npm start

You can stop the server with Ctrl+C.

However, every time you change your code, you'll need to stop and restart your server.

A better solution is to auto restart your server after you make some changes to your code. To do this, install Nodemon. Nodemon will watch your files and restart the server for you whenever your code changes.

Install Nodemon (you only need to do this once, and then it will be installed globally on your machine). In Terminal,

npm install -g nodemon

Now you can start with

nodemon

Push your code to heroku and Github

To get your updated code to heroku

git add .
git commit -m ""
git push heroku master

To get your updated code to GitHub

git add .
git commit -m ""
git push origin master

You can also update them together

git add .
git commit -am "your commit message"
git push origin master
git push heroku master