Back End Template

• This project was made in order to allow developers to quickly boilerplate a backend for whatever project they might be working on, it has only the essentials in getting a working API up and running.
• User registration, user login, and authentication with JSON Web Tokens are all already implemented.
• Sample tests have been written for the existing endpoints using Jest and Supertest. Run the tests with npm run test.
• A lot of the documentation makes reference to using Heroku as the site to deploy on but this backend should be deployable anywhere as long as you adjust the instructions accordingly and follow the steps as a guideline in setting up the API and database.

Next Steps

• Ideally, a developer should be able to use Knex migrations + seeds to quickly create the tables for whatever kind of data they're dealing with. You can refer to this guide on Knex migrations + seeds if you need a quick reminder of how they work. The Knex documentation is also very helpful.
• Any developer using this should focus on creating more routers and endpoints for their API and aim for full CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) functionality for their data.
• Be sure to use the authentication middleware so that only registered users who have logged in can interact with the API you build.
• Be sure to set your environment variables when you are ready to deploy your API and change the development environment to production. Important environment variables to set include: DATABASE_URL (for your postgres connection - should be automatically set when you provision Heroku Postgres) and DB_ENV (to set your deployment environment).
• Finally, when you have deployed to Heroku, make sure to provision Heroku Postgres. and run the command heroku pg:psql to connect to the remote database. You can then run bash via the terminal and Heroku CLI to run your migrations/seeds.

List of modules and libraries being used:

• Knex - SQL Query Builder for JavaScript.
• Knex-cleaner - Helper library to clean a PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite3 database tables using Knex. Great for integration tests.
• Helmet - helps you secure your Express apps by setting various HTTP headers.
• Express - minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for building web and mobile applications, as well as APIs. Can be thought of in the same vein as “React” but for the backend that way we use it. Will also allow our server to be able to read JSON.
• CORS - node.js package for providing a Connect/Express middleware that can be used to enable CORS (Cross Origin Resource sharing) with various options.
• Sqlite3 - relational database management system (RDBMS) that will let us interact with our .db3 files.
• Dotenv - is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env . Storing configuration in the environment separate from code is based on the Twelve-Factor App methodology.
• cross-env - run scripts that set and use environment variables across different platforms/OSes.
• bcryptjs - used for password hashing/salting/accumulative hashing rounds.
• Jsonwebtoken - add authentication when logging in to access protected routes.
• pg - node-postgres is a collection of node.js modules for interfacing with your PostgreSQL database.

Development dependencies:

• Nodemon - is a tool that helps develop node.js based applications by automatically restarting the node application when file changes in the directory are detected.
• jest - Jest is a JavaScript test runner, a library for creating, running, and structuring tests.
• supertest - HTTP assertions library that uses superagent to allow for easy API testing.

Endpoints for API

• get("/"): will return a message in JSON to you to let you know server is up

## What the response from the server should look like
{ message: "Server is running" }

• post("/auth/register"): will allow you to register a new user contingent on the username and email being unique, and the 3 required fields (username, password, email) being the correct data type.

## What the body of the request should look like when registering a new user
{
    "username": "testing",
    "password": "testing",
    "email": "[email protected]"
}

## What the body of the response should look like when registering a new user
{
    "id": 1,
    "username": "testing",
    "password": "$2a$10$loSggsJU0xbdgk65ragc3ebqqGRbQQc8qsCsQpEtuctLV4sljN3hq",
    "email": "[email protected]"
}

• post("/auth/login"): will allow you to login with a user and become authenticated if your credentials are correct as well the 2 required fields (username, password) being the correct data type.

## What the body of the request should look like when logging in
{
    "username": "testing",
    "password": "testing",
}
## What the body of the response should look like when logging in
{
    "message": "Welcome {username}!",
    "token": "eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWJqZWN0IjoyLCJ1c2VybmFtZSI6InRlc3RpbmciLCJsYXQiOjE2MDI4Mzg1OTYwODAsImlhdCI6MTYwMjgzODU5NiwiZXhwIjoxNjAyODQyMTk2fQ.wyzE1R0zYkR3zJkroWX1PdaRGuufhWlQtXUq9v17ZQ8"
}

Future Updates

• [ X ] Add testing for endpoints present
• [ ] Create documentation on adding in your data + endpoints
• [ ] Add more documentation on how the project works for developers unfamiliar with tech stack