Northcoders News - Backend

An example backend for a social news site.

A 'production' version is hosted at nc-news-gjzo.onrender.com. When this example server is not in use it is spun down, so it may take up to a minute for the first request to respond.

I built this as a portfolio project while on the Northcoders JavaScript full-stack course. A seeded database was provided (commit 9d279), after which all code is my own.

• The runtime environment is Node.js
• Testing uses the Jest and Supertest frameworks
• Server functions use Express
• Database functions use PostgreSQL

A list of endpoints is available from /api

How to run and test locally

Requires PostgreSQL v14.12+ and Node.js v22.3.0+

1. Clone the repo from github.com/stevelw/be-nc-news

   git clone https://github.com/stevelw/be-nc-news.git

2. Setup the environment

   Create three .env files in the root directory (only .env.test is needed to run the tests):

   1. .env.test with PGDATABASE=[YOUR-TEST-DATABASE-NAME]
   2. .env.development with PGDATABASE=[YOUR-DEVELOPMENT-DATABASE-NAME]
   3. .env.production with DATABASE_URL=[YOUR-SERVER-URL]

3. Install the development dependencies

   cd be-nc-news

   npm install -d

4. Setup the database

   npm run setup-dbs

   There is no need to seed the test database manually.

5. Run tests

   npm test or simply npm t

If you also wish to run the development environment locally, do the following:

1. Seed the development database

   npm run seed

2. Launch the local server

   node listen.js

   The default port is 9090