Project Overview

Name: Node/React Practicum Back-End
Description: This is the back-end server for a practicum project using Node.js and Express to create a RESTful API
The server communicates with a MongoDB database and provides endpoints for the front-end React application

Technology Stack

• Node.js: JavaScript runtime environment
• Express: Node.js web application framework for building RESTful APIs
• MongoDB: NoSQL database used for storing data
• Mongoose: Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js
• Nodemon: Tool for automatically restarting the server during development
• Dotenv: Module to load environment variables from a .env file
• JWT: JSON Web Tokens for authentication
• Bcrypt: Library for hashing passwords
• Cors: Middleware for enabling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
• Morgan: HTTP request logger middleware
• Body-Parser: Middleware for parsing incoming request bodies
• Swagger-ui-express: Module to provide with API's documentation via server route

API Documentation

Utilizing features of the Swagger-ui-express, API documentation can be accessed through /api/v1/docs route,
eliminating the need to surf through the /controllers and /routes, providing necessary data in a convenient form

Also keep in mind that Render allocates minimum of its CPU time, so waiting for the /api/v1/docs response may take awhile

Database Models

DB models are located within /models directory:

    ./models/Bookmarks.js
    ./models/Event.js
    ./models/User.js

Inside these files schemas can be found
Each schema maps to a MongoDB collection and defines the shape of the documents within that collection

For example, several properties from EventSchema:

    title: {
        type: String,
        unique: true,
        required: true
    },
    category: {
        type: String,
        enum: ['food', 'animal', 'environment', 'health', 'social'],
        default:'social',
        required: true
    },
    coordinates: {
        type: [Number],
        required: true,
        default: undefined,
    }
    

Each one is named and has several attributes:
type - defines DataType, accepts different values like String, Number, Date, Array, etc
unique - property must be unique among other documents in the collection, otherwise duplicate error is casted
required - property is integral, document can't exist without it, otherwise considered optional
enum - gives a list of predefined values of a certain DataType
default - sets the starting value of the property

Environment Variables

Some variables need to be accessible globally, while their values are static and may contain sensitive information
Dotenv is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env
By default, for security purposes, .env included into .gitignore file, to ensure if won't be pushed to repository and become publically accessible
However, the inner structure of the file can be shown, with no sensitive data included:

MONGO_URI=mongodb+srv://<username>:<password>@<cluster-url>/practicum
JWT_SECRET=<jwt_secret>
JWT_EXPIRES=1d
PORT=8000
GOOGLE_API_KEY=<googleApiKey>

Setup Instructions

1. Create a folder to contain both the front-end and back-end repos
2. Clone this repository to that folder
3. Run npm install or npm i to install dependencies
4. Pull the latest version of the main branch (when needed)
5. Run npm run dev to start the development server
6. Open http://localhost:8000/api/v1/ with your browser to test
7. Your back-end server is now running. You can now run the front-end app

Running the back-end server in Visual Studio Code

Note: In the below example, the group's front-end repository was named bb-practicum-team1-front and the back-end repository was named bb-practicum-team-1-back. Your repository will have a different name, but the rest should look the same

Testing the back-end server API in the browser