📰 Northcoders News API

Live API: news-project-lza1.onrender.com

📌 Project Overview

This backend project builds a RESTful API for programmatic data access. It uses PostgreSQL for data storage and node-postgres for database interactions.

⚙️ Minimum Requirements

Ensure you have the following installed:

• Node.js: v14.0.0 or higher
• PostgreSQL: v12.0 or higher

🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/alexiskelsall/backend_project.git
cd backend_project

2. Install Dependencies

npm install

3. Configure Environment Variables

Since .env.* files are ignored in version control, manually create them:

1. Install dotenv:

   npm install dotenv

2. Create .env.development and .env.test files in the root directory. Each should contain:

   PGDATABASE=nc_news

🛠 Database Setup

1. Create Databases

Ensure PostgreSQL is running, then create the necessary databases:

Automatic Setup

npm run setup-dbs

2. Seed the Database

npm run seed

✅ Testing

This project uses Jest for automated testing.

1. Run Tests

npm test

To run a specific test file:

npm test app.test.js

🔗 API Endpoints

Method	Route	Description
GET	/api	Returns all available API endpoints.
GET	/api/topics	Retrieves an array of all topics.
GET	/api/users	Retrieves an array of all users.
GET	/api/users/:username	Retrieves a specific user by username.
GET	/api/articles	Retrieves an array of all articles. Supports sorting and filtering.
GET	/api/articles/:article_id	Retrieves a specific article by article_id, including comment count.
GET	/api/articles/:article_id/comments	Retrieves all comments for a specific article.
PATCH	/api/articles/:article_id	Updates an article's vote count. Requires { inc_votes: newVoteCount }.
POST	/api/articles/:article_id/comments	Adds a comment to an article. Requires { username, body }.
DELETE	/api/comments/:comment_id	Deletes a comment by comment_id.

🔍 GET/api/topics

Response

  {
    "description": "The man, the Mitch, the legend",
    "slug": "mitch"
  },
  {
    "description": "Not dogs",
    "slug": "cats"
  },
  {
    "description": "what books are made of",
    "slug": "paper"
  }

🔍 POST/api/:article_id/comments

Request

   {
     "username": "Coder123",
      "body": "I really enjoyed this article!"
   }

Response

   {
      "comment_id": 102,
      "body": "I really enjoyed this article!",
      "article_id": 42,
      "author": "Coder123",
      "created_at": "2023-07-16T14:30:00.000Z",
      "votes": 0
   }

Notes

• Use the :article_id and :comment_id placeholder with actual values when making requests.
• You can modify responses using query parameters for sorting and filtering where supported.