ctc-fall-2021-boilerplate

This backend tutorial was based on the boilerplate developed by USC Code the Change! Thank you to all the developers who contributed to it over the years :)

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Setting Up Your Development Environment
• Development
• Testing

Overview

Welcome to the CTC x AthenaHacks Backend Development Tutorial 🎉

This boilerplate has a and backend/ directories, which contains an Express API server.

Here are some of the technologies used in this boilerplate (along with links to docs!):

Whole repo

• Typescript - Javascript but with types...much better autocomplete & debugging
• NodeJS - a runtime for JS that lets you run JS on the server, your laptop, or any other computing environment

Backend

• Express - web app framework for JS that we use for our API
• Sequelize - ORM for NodeJS that we use to interface with our database
• sequelize-typescript - makes it easier to use Typescript with Sequelize
• express-validator - middlewares for express that validate requests
• Postgres - open source SQL database that is awesome

Setting Up Your Local Environment

We recommend using Visual Studio Code for your development environment.

Mac

1. Install XCode and the XCode Command Line Tools using xcode-select --install
2. Install Homebrew
3. Install Node.js and npm via Homebrew brew install node
4. Install Yarn (npm++) via Homebrew using brew install yarn
5. Install PostgreSQL via Homebrew using brew install postgresql
6. Clone this repository to a local directory on your computer (git clone <repo_url> <dir>)
7. cd <dir>/backend and run yarn install, which will install all NPM packages specified by the package.json located in the backend directory of this repository

Windows

1. Install WSL
2. Install Node.js, npm, and Yarn using WSL following these instructions
3. Install PostgresSQL following these instructions
4. Clone this repository to a local directory on your computer (git clone <repo_url> <dir>)
5. cd <dir>/backend and run yarn install, which will install all NPM packages specified by the package.json located in the backend directory of this repository

Development

If you look inside package.json, you'll see a key called scripts. Yarn allows you to run these scripts in Terminal using the yarn run <script_name> format. There are a bunch of scripts set up that will allow you to build the server for production, run the server or client in development mode, and test/lint the server (and soon, the client).

Commands

Backend

❗️ Make sure Postgres is running before doing anything on the backend!

Navigate into the backend directory and run:

1. yarn start to start the server
2. yarn test to run backend tests
3. yarn lint to fix your ESLint errors

See the README in the backend directory