readme.md

RESTful Express HTTP server

Now that you've converted your Node HTTP server to Express, the final hurdle is to add route handlers for creating, updating, and destroying records in the database.

Getting started

Change into the project directory.

In order for our application to be able to process json we need to add app.use(express.json()) to our code in rest.js. Add this after you define the app instance.

app.use(express.json());

Assignment Part 1

Your next task is to create a RESTful Express HTTP server called rest.js to handle the create, update, and destroy HTTP commands. The route handlers must translate their respective command into an appropriate action that manages the records in the database. Once the database action is complete, the route handlers must send back an appropriate HTTP response.

Request Method	Request URL	Request Body	Response Status	Response Content-Type	Response Body
POST	/pets	{ "name": "Cornflake", "age": 3, "kind": "parakeet" }	200	application/json	{ "name": "Cornflake", "age": 3, "kind": "parakeet" }
GET	/pets/3	N/A	200	application/json	{ "name": "Cornflake", "age": 3, "kind": "parakeet" }
PATCH	/pets/3	{ "name": "Fido" }	200	application/json	{ "name": "Fido", "age": 3, "kind": "parakeet" }
GET	/pets/3	N/A	200	application/json	{ "name": "Fido", "age": 3, "kind": "parakeet" }
DELETE	/pets/3	N/A	200	application/json	{ "name": "Fido", "age": 3, "kind": "parakeet" }
GET	/pets/3	N/A	404	text/plain	Not Found

NOTE: The PATCH route handler must only update the record if age is an integer, kind is not missing, and name is not missing.

Like before, start the HTTP server with nodemon.

$ nodemon http.js

When handling the POST HTTP request method, if age, kind, or name are missing from the HTTP request body or age is not an integer, then the data must not be added to the database and the server must send back the follow HTTP response.

| Request Method | Request URL | Request Body | Response Status | Response Content-Type | Response Body | | -------------- | ----------- | ------------------------------------------ | --------------- | --------------------- | ------------- | --- | | POST | /pets | { "name": "", "age": "two", "kind": "" } | 400 | text/plain | Bad Request | |

Add 404 - Not Found middleware to handle all unknown HTTP requests and send an appropriate response.

Request Method	Request URL	Response Status	Response Content-Type	Response Body
GET	/	404	text/plain	Not Found
GET	/blah	404	text/plain	Not Found

Assignment Part 2

Re-work your server so that it connects to a RDBMS (e.g. Postgres or MySQL) and queries that database in each route instead of a JSON file. Also, refactor any call-back based operations to use their Promise-based alternatives (e.g. db.query and fs.readFile.

This will require you to create a new database, build out the table(s), install certain dependencies using npm, and tell the server to connect to the database before you can run queries in each route.

Bonus

Add 500 Internal Server Error middleware to handle all internal server errors and send an appropriate response. It may be helpful to test your error-handling middleware with a route handler that calls the next() function with a new Error(). See approach #2 in the Node.js Error Handling guide for more details on how the next() function works in Express.

Request Method	Request URL	Response Status	Response Content-Type	Response Body
GET	/boom	500	text/plain	Internal Server Error

Once this is working, refactor your server's route handlers to call the next() function to handle all filesystem errors instead of using throw.

Bonus

Add basic access authentication middleware to protect all routes from unauthorized access. In other words, the middleware must send the following HTTP response for all unauthorized HTTP requests.

Response Status	Response Content-Type	Response WWW-Authenticate	Response Body
401	text/plain	Basic realm="Required"	Unauthorized

To make an authorized HTTP request, the user must specify the correct credentials such as a name of admin and a password of meowmix. The client will then encode the credentials and include them in the Authorization header of the HTTP request.

Request Method	Request URL	Request Authorization
GET	/pets	Basic YWRtaW46bWVvd21peA==

Here's an example of making an unauthorized HTTP request.

$ http -v GET localhost:8000/pets
GET /pets HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Host: localhost:8000
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.9.3



HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 12
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 13:33:33 GMT
ETag: W/"c-4G0bpw8TMen5oRPML4h9Pw"
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Required"

Unauthorized

And here's an example of making an authorized HTTP request.

$ http -v --auth admin:meowmix GET localhost:8000/pets
GET /pets HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46bWVvd21peA==
Connection: keep-alive
Host: localhost:8000
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.9.3



HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 84
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 13:33:53 GMT
ETag: W/"54-D2Au1DrDyt59Q+wXwR4adQ"

[
    {
        "age": 7,
        "kind": "rainbow",
        "name": "fido"
    },
    {
        "age": 5,
        "kind": "snake",
        "name": "Buttons"
    }
]