Emergency Complimenter with Mongoose

We're going to revisit the Emergency Compliment app from a couple nights ago, except with a few key differences this time. Instead of pulling from and pushing to an array of compliments saved locally, we're going to pull from and push to a Mongo database that exists on a server somewhere.

STEPS

Step 1: Fork and clone the homework repo

• Just like we always do

Step 2: Set up Mongolab credentials

• We're going to be contacting a database on Mongolab's servers for this. In order to do so, we need to set up our database credentials. We'll use environment variables to hide the credentials so they don't appear in Github, like we always do.

Create a database instance on your mLab account, then once it's created go find the connection string (it looks something like this: mongodb://<dbuser>:<dbpassword>@ds055574.mlab.com:55574/<r_database_name>, where you replace <dbuser>, <dbpassword> and <r_database_name> with your username, password and database name respectively). Copy that string.

Then create a .env in the main directory (mongoose_compliment). Add the following to your .env file:

WDI_COMPLIMENT_DB=<your-mongo-connection-string>

Once you've successfully set your credentials in the .env file, you should be all set to connect to mLab your app.

Step 3: Usual Express setup

• npm install
• nodemon

Step 4: Set up your model

• The model file in models/compliment.js is basically empty. You'll need to set this up in order to use the Compliment model in later files. Read through the notes from the walkthrough for hints.

Step 5: Retrieve a compliment from the database

• Now, all the work you need to do is inside the /routes/index.js file. Go find the route inside that file where you'll need to display a compliment from the database.
• Use your Mongo/Mongoose skillz to retrieve a random compliment from the database, and pass it to the view. The view itself has already been created.

Step 6: Save a compliment to the database

• Find the route where the form for creating a compliment is POSTed to. Take the compliment that is sent through that form, and use Mongo to save it to the database. Once that is done successfully, redirect the user to the homepage.

Tips

• Remember, database calls in Node are done asynchronously. That means that whenever you make a call to the database, anything that relies upon that data will need to happen in a callback.
• Check out the Mongoose documentation or examples of Mongoose and Express together to get a sense of what to write.

Licensing

All content is licensed under a CC­BY­NC­SA 4.0 license. All software code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. For commercial use or alternative licensing, please contact legal@ga.co.