Message store web service

A simple web service to store and retrieve messages (strings of text).

Example usage of the service (see the next section for details of how to get it running):

$ curl http://localhost:3000/messages/ -d 'my test message to store'
{"id":12345}

$ curl http://localhost:3000/messages/12345
my test message to store

Running the application

The application can be run from a git clone of the project. After cloning it, install the node dependencies with:

npm install .

To start the application (including the HTTP server and the database access layer) on Linux (or similar *nix system), do:

./bin/message-store

On Windows you can try:

node .\src\main.js

(I haven't tested this yet.)

By default, the application runs at http://localhost:3000. (I plan to make this configurable later.)

Development

You can lint the code (src/) with:

gulp lint

You can lint the tests (test/) with:

gulp lint-tests

Running the test suite

To run the integration test suite, do:

gulp test-integration

This starts the whole application, running the HTTP server (on a random port higher than 8000) and configuring the database.

Note that the test suite uses an in-memory SQLite database. If you modify the tests to use a persistent database, you will need to modify the code to ensure that the database is emptied before each test runs (see the beforeEach() hook in the integration tests under test/integration/).

Database configuration

The connection to the database is managed by Sequelize. See the Sequelize docs for further options not covered here.

By default, the application uses an in-memory SQLite database to store posted messages. However, by creating a JSON configuration file for the database connection, you can make the message storage persistent.

Database configuration is stored in a JSON file with this format:

{
  "dialect": "sqlite|mysql|postgres|mssql",

  # only for SQLite
  "storage": "/path/to/sqlite/file",

  # only for non-SQLite
  "database": "databasename",
  "username": "username",
  "password": "password",
  "host": "host",

  # alternative to "host" if using a socket for MySQL
  "socketPath": "/path/to/mysql/socket"
}

You can tell message-store where the database configuration is by setting the MESSAGE_STORE_DB_CONFIG environment variable, e.g.

MESSAGE_STORE_DB_CONFIG=/home/me/my-config.json ./bin/message-store

Note that if you are using mysql, postgres or mssql as the dialect, you will also need to install additional npm packages (message-store only installs the SQLite package):

• Postgres: npm install pg pg-hstore
• MySQL: npm install mysql
• MSSQL: npm install tedious

Examples

SQLite persisting to a file:

{
  "dialect": "sqlite",
  "storage": "/home/me/message-storage.sqlite"
}

MySQL configuration (using XAMPP socket):

{
  "dialect": "mysql",
  "database": "message-store",
  "username": "message-store",
  "password": "password",
  "socketPath": "/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock"
}

NB you will need to create the database and user as per usual for a MySQL-backed web application before running message-store.

TODO

• add licence headers to all source files
• make server settings configurable by file or env
• unit tests for models, endpoints
• coverage reporting for unit tests
• automatic server reload when code changes
• proper logging, instead of just logging to console
• instructions to install as a service on Linux

Bugs

Please report bugs to the github bug tracker at https://github.com/townxelliot/message-store/issues

Author

Elliot Smith <elliot@townx.org>

Licence

Distributed under the MIT licence (see LICENCE-MIT.txt)