william-schutte/around-express

Backend RESTful API for AroundTheUS project.

Project 12-15: Around The U.S. Back End

William Schutte

September 2020

Practicum by Yandex

Overview

This project represents work from the 12th, 13th, and 14th projects for the web-dev course. These projects build upon each other, first setting up a server with Node.js and Express.js, then integrating with a MongoDB database. The server has a custom RESTful API connecting it to my previous front-end React project (transcompiled w/ Create-React-App, Web-Pack, Babel).

Project 15: Backend user login/creation, middleware auth., Azure cloud deployment Project 14: Frontend features on React-Around-Auth repo, login/register pages, user auth. Project 13: RESTful API desing, MongoDB setup, Basic authorization
Project 12: Initial setup of Express.js, file structure, and routing

Techniques

This server uses Express.js, launching on Local Port 3000.
Mongoose used for models and MongoDB interactions.

Technologies

• Mongoose
• MongoDB
• Express.js
• Node.js
• Git/GitHub

Running the Project

npm run start — to launch the server.
npm run dev — to launch the server with the hot reload feature.

My best friends:

1. Mongoose Documentation
2. Express.JS Documentation
3. Node.JS Documentation

Revisions:

Project 15: First Review: 11/2/20

• Altered centralized error handler to catch and properly label Celebrate errors
• Added Celebrate prescreening to createCard route

Project 13: First Review: 9/21/20

• Added period to middle of URL regex to catch more invalid URLs
• Explicitly defined error handling in createCard and createUser functions
• Modified getUserById() function to return error if findById() returns null data
  • Note: When using Mongoose's findById() method, if the given ID param is of the expected length, it will return null instead of an error

Project 12: Fourth Review: 9/13/20

• Changed error response codes to 500 for file read errors in cards.js and users.js

Project 12: Third Review: 9/11/20

• Addressed error handling for server-side file reading by changing promises in both cards.js and users.js, errors now print to user

Project 12: Second Review: 9/10/20

• Fixed route files:
  • Removed extra null route handlers
  • Used fs promises for data reading
  • Added status 200 to all successful responses
  • Rewrote file paths using path.join correctly
  • Added error handling to promises that notifies users

Project 12: First Review: 9/9/20

• Added "Resource not found" message to app.js to catch all errant urls
• Instead of importing JSON data with require(), used Node's fs module and readFile() method