alfredomtx/trip-builder

Laravel REST API for searching Flights, a much simpler version of what a real flight searching platform does.

🐘 What is this project?

It's a REST API for searching Flights, a much simpler version of what a real flight searching platform do.

I developed this project as a Coding Assessment to test my technical skills during a job application.

Usage guide can be found down below, keep reading! 🙂

What the API can do:

• Search flights from airport A to B (one way trip).
• Search flights from airport A to B and B to A (round trip).
• Search flights from airport A with multiple connections(stops) until B, and vice versa.
• Paginated responses.

🔎 Search filters:

• departure_airport: The departure airport IATA code
• arrival_airport: The arrival airport IATA code.
• departure_date: Date of departure.
• type: Trip type, it can be a one-way or round-trip.
• return_date: Date of the return trip.
• stops: Number of stops, can be blank(all flights), 0(direct flights only) or 1. When 1, will filter flights with 1+ stops
• airline: IATA Code of the airline to filter the flights.
• page_size: Size per page. Defaults to 10.
• page: Page to view.
• sort_by: Sorting field, currently can be only price.
• sort_order: Sorting order, can be either asc or desc.

🆗 Improvement points

There are many things that could and should be improved in the project, since I had a limited time to work on it, it is not near a state-of-the-art code.

Here are a few things that could be done:

• Frontend: would be really cool to make a front end for this to consume and interact with the API!
• REST endpoints for all resources: currently only Airline has endpoints for CRUD operations, ideally there would be for Airlines, Airports and Flights.
• Sad path tests: most tests are happy tests, to ensure the application is working, but sad tests are important, but it also takes a bit of time.
• More sorting options: currently it is only sorting by price. Sorting by flight duration and # of stops would be interesting.

🚀 Stack

• PHP 8.1
• Laravel 8
• MySQL database

🧑‍💻 Usage

Database Setup

This app uses MySQL. To use something different, open up config/Database.php and change the default driver.

To use MySQL, make sure you install it, setup a database and then add your db credentials(database, username and password) to the .env.example file and rename it to .env.

Migrations

To create all the necessary tables and columns, run the following

php artisan migrate

Seeding The Database

To add the dummy data(Cities, Airports, Airlines and Flights), run the following

php artisan db:seed

Running the App

Simply run the command below, and it should be available at http://localhost/, ready for you to make requests.

php artisan serve

Documentation

The documentation was generated using Scribe, with the app running on localhost, you can access it in http://localhost/docs.

You can make requests to the API in the documentation page, without the need of other programs like Postman, which is pretty cool.

Tests

There are feature tests and a few unit tests for most endpoints and important features. To run the tests, run the command below.

PHPUnit is set to use an in-memory database for the tests, so you can run the tests locally without any prior setting needed(not even MySQL configured).

php artisan test