NC-NEWS

NC-NEWS is my attemp at a replication of a back-end news website. I created this to learn more about Express.js, Knex.js, TDD, and Node.js in general.

a working version of this back end is hosted on Heroku.

Getting Started

For this project a number of scripts are included but the following instructions will tell you how to do this using the native knex and psql commands

First things first

for this to work you will need to install psql, you can follow the tutorial here for linux psql

IT IS HIGHLY RECOMENDED THAT YOU SETUP PSQL WITH A NEW PASSWORD YOU HAVE NOT USED ANYWHERE ELSE AS SOME MISTAKES COULD LEAD TO YOU COMMITING THIS INFORMATION TO THE INTERNET.

As the setup is different on linux than on other systems i will be focusing on linux but the instructions are genrally relevant to all systems the main diffrence is that knex requires your database username and password to make a connection. but we will cover this further down.

npm install

npm install

This will install a number of dependencies including mocha, chai,chai-sorted, pg, knex,supertest, and express.

Please note you will need to install knex globally to make use of the raw knex commands that are about to follow

In order to setup this project locally you should run the setup.sql file located under ./db/setup.sql

You can do this by executing this command.

psql -f ./db/setup.sql

Linux users only

Once your database is up and running you will need to navigate to ./knexfile.js

and change the username, and password to reference your psql username and psql password.

you should find some code that looks like this, you only need to change the development and test keys.

const customConfigs = {
  development: {
    connection: {
      database: "nc_news",
      username: "YOUR PSQL USERNAME",
      password: "YOUR PSQL PASSWORD"
    }
  },
  test: {
    connection: {
      database: "nc_news_test",
      username: "YOUR PSQL USERNAME",
      password: "YOUR PSQL PASSWORD"
    }

It is highly recommended that you import these in from a file that is gitignored so that when these files are commited to your remote repository your private information is not available for all to see.

Knex migrations

Once you have initialised your dev and test databases you can use knex migrate to make use of the supplied migration files under ./db/migrations. the following command will tell knex to execute each of the migration files in time stamp order.

knex migrate:latest

this will create all of the necessary tables for your database with the correct columns.

Seeding

Once the tables and columns have been established we need to seed them, luckily knex has another command which allows us to do this. Using knex seed run tells knex to execute the seed file located in ./knexfile.js e.g...

const ENV = process.env.NODE_ENV || "development";
const { DB_URL } = process.env;
const baseConfig = {
  client: "pg",

  migrations: {
    directory: "./db/migrations"
  },
  seeds: {
    directory: "./db/seeds" //<------------------
  }
};

You will notice that the first line of this file makes use of a conditional statment, this is used for testing but we'll speak more on this later.

for now execute this command

knex seed:run

this will seed the database with some data, you can find the raw data here --> ./db/data/dev-data if you should like to take a look.

Lets see if it worked

To check your migrations and seeding worked you can login to psql \c into nc_news and select * from articles to receive a huge list of articles.

Testing using mocha chai and NODE_ENV

As noted earlier in the tutorial there was a conditional variable declaration in the knexfile.js

const ENV = process.env.NODE_ENV || "development"; //<-----------
const { DB_URL } = process.env;
const baseConfig = {
  client: "pg",

  migrations: {
    directory: "./db/migrations"
  },
  seeds: {
    directory: "./db/seeds"
  }
};

Node.js allows us to manually set an environment property in node and refrence this in our code, the end result of which allows us to use diffrent data and knex configs based on the environemt

you will notice that the module.exports at the bottom of the file exports a spread of the base config and corresponding key of the customConfig object

const customConfigs = {
  development: {
    connection: {
      database: "nc_news",
      username: "tony",
      password: "password"
    }
  },
  test: {
    connection: {
      database: "nc_news_test",
      username: "tony",
      password: "password"
    }
  },
  production: {
    connection: `${DB_URL}?ssl=true`
  }
};

module.exports = { ...baseConfig, ...customConfigs[ENV] }; //<----

noramlly you would make use of this by setting your NODE_ENV to test within the cli before running you knex migrate and knex seed commands but as this repo comes complete with a ready made suite of tests you can simply make use the npm test script provided in the package JSON.

npm test

this will result in a series of 50+ gloriously passing test while also intialising your test database.

you can check your new test database by running psql and \c into nc_news_test

and select * from articles

to receive a series of test articles

once this is done and your tests have passed you can move on to deployment.

Built With

Express.js

Knex.js

Mocha

chai

Supertest

Nodemon

PG

Psql

Contributing

Feel free to fork and use as you like, also any pull requests will be inspected and actioned.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details