Mflix

This is a short guide on setting up the system and environment dependencies required for the MFlix application to run.

Disclaimer: The dependencies and versions in this project are not maintained. This project is intended for educational purposes and is not intended to be exposed in a network, so use at your own discretion.

Project Structure

Downloading the mflix-js.zip handout may take a few minutes. Unzipping the file should create a new directory called mflix-js.

Most of your work will be implementing methods in the dao directory, which contains all database interfacing methods. The API will make calls to Data Access Objects (DAOs) that interact directly with MongoDB.

The unit tests in test will test these database access methods directly, without going through the API. The UI will run these methods in integration tests, and therefore requires the full application to be running.

The lesson handouts can be found in the test/lessons directory. These files will look like <lesson-name>.spec.js, and can be run with npm test -t <lesson-name>.

The API layer is fully implemented, as is the UI. The application is programmed to run on port 5000 by default - if you need to run on a port other than 5000, you can edit the dotenv_win (if on Windows) or the dotenv_unix file (if on Linux or Mac) in the root directory to modify the value of PORT.

Please do not modify the API layer in any way, under the mflix-js/src/api directory. This may result in the front-end application failing to validate some of the labs.

Node Library Dependencies

The dependencies for the MFlix application should be downloaded using the npm command-line tool. You can get this tool by downloading Node.js. Make sure to choose the correct option for your operating system.

Once the installation is complete, you may need to restart your computer before using the command line tools. You can test that it's installed by running the following command:

node -v

This should print out the version of node you currently have - we recommend using the latest Long Term Support version, currently 10.16.3, so this command should print something like v10.16.3.

Once npm is installed, you can install the MFlix dependencies by running the following command from the mflix-js directory:

npm install

You must run this from the top level of the project, so npm has access to the package.json file where the dependencies are.

You may see warnings depending on your operating system from fsevents or Husky warning about git missing. These are informational only and do not impact the functionality of the application. You can safely ignore them.

You may also get a node-gyp error. Run npm rebuild and it should resolve this and install the dependencies required.

While running npm install, you might encounter the below error regarding node-gyp rebuild. Although, it is completely harmless and you can start the application by running npm start.

Running the Unit Tests

To run the unit tests for this course, you will use Jest. Jest has been included in this project's dependencies, so npm install should install everything you need.

Each course lab contains a module of unit tests that you can call individually with npm test. For example, to run the test connection-pooling.test.js, run the command:

npm test -t connection-pooling

Each ticket will contain the exact command to run that ticket's specific unit tests. You can run these commands from anywhere in the mflix-js project.