Project Setup

In light of our requirements, we know that we will need to cater for at least two data structures - Reader and Book, with the corresponding controllers, routes and tests.

Getting set up

We are going to set up an express app which uses Sequelize to interact with a Postgres database. The steps assume you have Postgres running in a docker container on your machine. It also references the music-library-api. If you get stuck, it would be a good idea to check back there for examples.

We will start by setting up the repository, a basic express app and a mocha/chai/supertest test suite.

Repository Setup

1. Create a new directory for the project on your computer

2. Create a new README.md file in the root of your project

3. Initialise a git repo in the new directory with git init

4. Add an empty .gitignore file

5. Create a repository for the project on Github

6. Connect your local repository to the remote GitHub repository

7. Initialise a new NPM project in your project directory with npm init

1 Add node_modules to your .gitignore file

Application Setup

1. Install express, and pg as dependencies

2. Set up your basic index.js and src/app.js similar to how you did in the Music API project

   1. src/app.js should configure and export a basic Express application.
   2. index.js should call app.listen() and then console.log() the port that the app is listening on.

3. Install dotenv and nodemon as development dependencies

4. Add a start script to your package.json file with the following command: nodemon -r dotenv/config index.js. This uses nodemon to execute the index.js file with the environment variables loaded from a .env file.

5. Create a scripts folder, and copy the create-database.js and drop-database.js scripts from the music-library. Your create database script only needs to create the database. We will use Sequelize to handle setting up our tables.

6. Add a prestart script to your package.json. Set the command to node scripts/create-database.js. This will run before the npm start command, and will create your database if it doesn't already exist.

7. Create a .env file with the following variables:

    PGPASSWORD=password
    PGDATABASE=book_library_dev
    PGUSER=postgres
    PGHOST=localhost
    PGPORT=5433

At this point you should be able to run npm start in your terminal, and get a listening express server.

Test Environment Setup

1. Install mocha, chai, and supertest as dev dependencies.

2. Copy across the test-setup.js from the music-library-api

3. Add a .env.test with the same environment variables as your .env. Make sure to give your test database a different name.

4. Add .env.test to your .gitignore

5. Add a test script to your package.json file: mocha tests/**/*.js --exit --recursive --timeout 60000 --file ./tests/test-setup.js

6. Add a pretest script to your package.json. Set the command to: node scripts/create-database.js test. Note that this time we pass the test option at the end of the command. This tells the script to load the variables from .env.test instead of .env.

7. Add a posttest script, set the command to: node scripts/drop-database.js test. This will delete your test database after your tests have finished running.

At this point, you should be able to run npm test in your terminal. Mocha should run and inform you that there are no tests yet. Commit your work to Github.