We will be building an API for the purpose of accessing application data programmatically. The intention here is to mimic the building of a real world backend service (such as reddit) which should provide this information to the front end architecture.
Your database will be PSQL, and you will interact with it using node-postgres.
Dotenv is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env. As .env.* is added to the .gitignore, anyone who wishes to clone the repo will not have access to the necessary environment variables. So, as a developer, you will need to create two .env files for your project: .env.test and .env.development (you can look at the .env-example file as an example). This creates two separate environments, one for production, and one for development. Inside each, add PGDATABASE=<database_name_here>, with the correct database name for that environment (see /db/setup.sql for the database names). This will successfully connect to the two databases locally and depending on what command you are running, the correct enviroment will be deployed.
To ensure we are not commiting broken code this project makes use of git hooks. Git hooks are scripts triggered during certain events in the git lifecycle. Husky is a popular package which allows us to set up and maintain these scripts. This project makes use a pre-commit hook. When we attempt to commit our work, the script defined in the pre-commit file will run. If any of our tests fail than the commit will be aborted.
The Husky documentation explains how to configure Husky for your own project as well as creating your own custom hooks._