NC News is a news aggregation demo loosely based on Reddit. This API was built during week six of the Northcoders' Full Stack Developer Course.
This project aims to demonstrate some of the skills learnt in four weeks of back end study including:
- JavaScript programming
- building a RESTful Web API to respond to HTTP requests
- storing data and interacting with databases
- Test Driven Development
This back end application is consumed by a front end React app created during week nine of the course. Details of the front end may be found on Github: github.com/ben-web/NC-News-Front-End.
A working example of this API is published at ben-web-nc-news-back-end.herokuapp.com.
Heroku free hosting can be a little slow to start so please allow for this when starting the application.
The API provides JSON responses to HTTP request methods relating to Articles, Comments, Topics and Users as described on the API.
Articles may be retrieved or added using the appropriate GET or POST HTTP method.
It's possible to retrieve all articles or articles filtered by topic.
Comments may be posted to an article on this endpoint.
Comment votes may be incremented or decremented using a PATCH method.
A comment may be deleted using DELETE.
Topics may be retrieved or added using the appropriate GET or POST method.
A user object may be retrieved from this endpoint.
Bad route, request and database errors result in the relevant 400/500 response headers and an error message in the JSON response body.
Express's next() method is used to handle errors.
The original seed data for this project did not contain images for the articles. To make the front end more visually appealing, I've added a function to the Article model to insert a random image when an Article object is created.
I've also added random vote counts to Article objects in order to demonstrate sorting by vote count on the front end.
These instructions will help you to get a copy of NC News up and running on your local machine for testing purposes.
Before installing this project, ensure you have this software installed:
Duplicate or fork this repository from github.com/ben-web/NC-News-Back-End.
Inside this new directory, install the required NPM packages:
npm installNext, create a config directory in your project root. In this directory, add an index.js file with the following content:
process.env.NODE_ENV = process.env.NODE_ENV || 'development';
const dbConfig = {
development: 'mongodb://localhost:27017/northcoders_news',
production: 'mongodb://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>.<YOUR_PRODUCTION_DB_URL>',
test: 'mongodb://localhost:27017/northcoders_news_test'
};
module.exports = dbConfig[process.env.NODE_ENV]Before seeding the database, ensure you have MongoDB running. In a separate CLI instance run the command:
mongod
Data is stored in the ./seed/data directory in JSON format. To seed your database with this data, run this command in your project CLI:
npm run seed:dev
If successful, you will see this message:
Added to DB: 36 Articles | 300 Comments | 3 Topics | 6 Users
To start the application, run this command in the CLI:
npm run dev
If successful, you will see this message:
Express server listening on - http://localhost:9090
Connected to mongodb://localhost:27017/northcoders_news
You may now access the application at http://localhost:9090.
A HTML summary of API endpoints is displayed at http://localhost:9090/api.
As an example, make a GET request to http://localhost:9090/api/articles.
The /api/articles endpoint will return a JSON array of article objects in this format:
{
"articles": [
{
"_id": "5b794cd225a65452d9155364",
"votes": 0,
"title": "Running a Node App",
"created_by": {
"_id": "5b794cd225a65452d9155363",
"username": "jessjelly",
"name": "Jess Jelly",
"avatar_url": "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/39/62/ec/3962eca164e60cf46f979c1f57d4078b.jpg",
"__v": 0
},
"body": "This is part two of a series on how to get up and running with Systemd and Node.js. This part dives deeper into how to successfully run your app with systemd long-term, and how to set it up in a production environment.",
"created_at": "2016-08-18T12:07:52.389Z",
"belongs_to": "coding",
"image_url": "https://picsum.photos/g/600/300?image=30",
"votes": 51
"__v": 0,
"comments": 8
}
]
}Automated tests for each endpoint are located in ./spec/api.spec.js.
Run these tests using the command:
npm run test
Results are then displayed for each test:
NORTHCODERS NEWS API
/api/topics
Connected to mongodb://localhost:27017/northcoders_news_test
✓ GET topics returns all topic objects, and those objects have the expected keys (44ms)
/api/topics/:topic_slug/articles
✓ GET articles by topic_slug returns status 200 and all article objects that match the slug, objects have the expected keys
✓ GET articles by topic_slug returns article objects which have a created_by key populated with the correct user
✓ GET articles by topic_slug includes comment count with correct value
✓ GET articles by non-existent topic_slug returns status 404 and error message
✓ POST article returns status 201 posted article object with expected keys and values
✓ POST article with non-existent topic_slug returns status 400 and error message
✓ POST article with missing required field returns status 400 and error message
/api/articles
✓ GET articles returns status 200 and all article objects, objects have the expected keys
✓ GET articles returns article objects which have a created_by key populated with correct user
✓ GET articles includes comment count with correct value
/api/articles/:article_id
✓ GET article with valid article_id returns status 200 that article object with expected keys
✓ GET article returns article object which has a created_by key populated with the correct user
✓ GET article includes comment count with correct value
✓ GET article with non-existent article_id returns status 404 and error message
✓ GET article with invalid article_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ PATCH article vote=up increments article vote by 1, returns status 200 and updated article object
✓ PATCH article vote=down decrements article vote by 1 returns status 200 and updated article object
✓ PATCH article with non-existent article_id returns status 404 and error message
✓ PATCH article with invalid article_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ PATCH article with invalid vote value returns status 400 and error message
/api/articles/:article_id/comments
✓ GET comments with valid article_id returns stats 200 and that articles comment objects with expected keys
✓ GET comments returns comment objects which have a belongs_to key populated with the correct article
✓ GET comments returns comment objects which have a created_by key populated with the correct user
✓ GET comments returns status 404 if there are no comments related to the specified article
✓ GET comments with non-existent article_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ GET comments with invalid article_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ POST comment with valid article_id returns posted comment object with expected keys and values
✓ POST comment returns comment object which has a created_by key populated with the correct user object
✓ POST comment with missing required field returns status 400 and error message
✓ POST comment with non-existent article_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ POST comment with invalid article_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ POST comment with non-existent user_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ POST comment with invalid user_id returns status 400 and error message
/api/comments/:comment_id
✓ PATCH comment vote=up increments comment vote by 1, returns status 200 and updated comment object
✓ PATCH comment vote=down decrements comment vote by 1, returns status 200 and updated comment object
✓ PATCH comment with non-existent comment_id returns status 404 and error message
✓ PATCH comment with invalid comment_id returns status 400 and error message
✓ DELETE comment with valid comment_id returns status 200 and deleted comment object
✓ DELETE comment with valid comment_id removes comment from DB
✓ DELETE comment with non-existent comment_id returns status 404 and error message
✓ DELETE comment with invalid comment_id returns status 400 and error message
/api/users/:username
✓ GET user with valid username returns status 200 and the requested user object
✓ GET user with non-existent username returns status 404 and error message
44 passing (4s)
Tests use SuperTest, Mocha and Chai for assertion based testing.
Tests use their own database as configured in .config/index.js. This database is reseeded before each test using data that is stored in the ./seed/testData directory in JSON format.
Endpoints in a RESTful API must respond to HTTP verbs in the correct manner. The tests in this project therefore:
- validate that data is retrieved or amended as appropriate to the controller and HTTP request method
- data is returned in the correct JSON format
- correct HTTP status codes are attached to the response header
- error messages are returned where required
This example makes a request for a single article using its ID parameter. The test checks that the endpoint's response:
- has the correct HTTP status code
- includes an article object in the correct format
- that the article returned is the correct article
it('GET article with valid article_id returns status 200 that article object with expected keys', () => {
return request
.get(`/api/articles/${articleDocs[0]._id}`)
.expect(200)
.then(res => {
expect(res.body).to.have.all.keys('article');
expect(res.body.article).to.be.an('object');
expect(res.body.article).to.have.all.keys(
'_id',
'title',
'body',
'comments',
'created_at',
'created_by',
'belongs_to',
'image_url',
'votes',
'__v'
);
expect(res.body.article._id).to.equal(articleDocs[0]._id.toString());
});
});This example makes a request for a single article that does not exist. The test checks that the endpoint's response has the correct HTTP error status code.
it('GET article with non-existent article_id returns status 404 and error message', () => {
return request
.get(`/api/articles/${nonExistentId}`)
.expect(404)
.then(res => {
expect(res.body.message).to.equal('Article Not Found');
});
});Please see the ./spec/api.spec.js file for the specification of each test.
- Node.js - JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine
- Express.js - Web Framework for Node.js
- MongoDB - Document Database
- Mongoose - Object Modelling for Node and Mongo DB
- Mocha - JavaScript test framework
- Chai - Asserion based testing for Mocha
- Supertest - HTTP assertion testing agent
- Ben Web - Northcoders Student - northcoders.com