Schema Design and Building RESTful APIs: ToDo List

Build a full CRUD, RESTful API using Express and Postgres for a Todo List.

Lab Directions

• Create all of your necessary app files in this directory. (I have included GitHub's standard Node.js .gitignore template so that you don't end up pushing node_modules to GitHub.
• You should npm install express pg knex. Use express to build your API. Use knex to create your database migrations and seeds. Use pg to connect your express API to your database.
• Your core app logic must be separated into the appropriate files, and your project files should be organized into folders according to their purpose: models, controllers, and/or routes.

API Endpoints

Each endpoint should respond with the appropriate JSON response. Our API should support:

HTTP Verb	PATH	Description
GET	/todos	A route to see all todos
GET	/todos/:id	A route to see details about an individual todo item
POST	/todos	Create a todo
PUT/PATCH	/todos/:id	The ability to update the description of a todo
PUT/PATCH	/todos/:id/complete	The ability to mark a todo complete
DELETE	/todos/:id	Delete a todo

Setting Up Your App for Deployment

In order to make your application work both locally and when deployed, you will need to have configurations that works for both your local machine and in Heroku. On the Heroku servers, there will automatically some variables that do not existing locally. These variables exist on the process.env object.

Configuring Your Port

In your main server file, update the line of code where you declare your port to:

const PORT = process.env.PORT || 8000; // Or whichever port you choose for your local server

This allows your application to set the port number to Heroku's production port. Since this variable is undefined locally, it will be set to 8000 (or whichever port number you choose) when you are developing on you personal computer.

Configuring Your Database Connection

If your application is running on Heroku, there will be a variable called process.env.NODE_ENV with a value of 'production'. If your are on you local machine, then this variable will be undefined. Depending on which environment you are in, you'll need to use a different pg connection object. We can check with a basic ternary operator like so:

const { Pool } = require('pg')

const connectionDevelopment = {
  database: 'todo',  // Or replace this with your database name
  user: 'postgres',              // If you have a different postgres user, replace here
  password: '',                  // If you have a postgres password, write it here
  host: 'localhost',
  port: 5432
}

const connectionProduction = {
  connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL, 
  ssl: {rejectUnauthorized: false}
}

const pool = new Pool(process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' ? connectionProduction : connectionDevelopment)

Configuring Your knexfile

The exports of your knexfile.js should have two properties, one for development and one for production, like so:

module.exports = {
  development: {
    client: 'pg',
    connection: {
      database: 'todo',       // Or replace this with your database name
      user:     'postgres',
      password: ''
    }
  },
  production: {
    client: 'pg',
    connection: process.env.DATABASE_URL
  }
};

Final Steps: Deploy Your API

Deploy Your Project to Heroku and submit the link on Canvas. Provide the URL to your github repo as a comment in your submission. When your app is deployed, be sure to test that is works by making API calls to it.

You can read this tutorial on deploying an Express app with Postgres on Heroku and running knex migrations and seeds.