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Setup

Database

We use postgres for our database so you'll need to set that up on your machine. Once installed, open the postgres shell using the psql command from your terminal and do the following.

1. Create your development user:

CREATE USER alive2020_dev SUPERUSER;

2. Create your development database:

CREATE DATABASE alive2020_development;

NOTE: If you made any changes to the described setup here, you will need to reflect them in the steps below for setting up our environment variables.

ENV

Exit the postgres shell and create a new file in the root of this directory called .env. Now copy the contents of .env.example into it, and do the following:

1. Leave NODE_CONFIG_DIR as is. This tells the config package where to find environment variables for our environment in the node application.
2. Replace the value for APP_SECRET with something secret. This will be used to encrypt things like the JWT token used to authenticate users.
3. Replace the value for POSTGRES_DATABASE with alive2020_development.
4. Replace the value for POSTGRES_USERNAME with alive2020_dev.
5. If you gave your database user (alive2020_dev) a password in the steps above (you probably didn't), replace the value for POSTGRES_PASSWORD with it. If you did not, remove this line so that the value will be null.
6. Leave POSTGRES_HOST as is.

Packages

Install packages needed for server: npm install

Database Part 2 / Sequelize CLI

Before running the app, you'll want to use the sequelize CLI to create our tables in your postgres database. Install the CLI using npm install -g sequelize-cli (if not already installed) and then run the following"

sequelize db:migrate

NOTE: You may have noticed the file config/database.js. This file exists solely for the CLI and not sequelize as used by our node application. The node application uses the file api/models/index.js to automatically connect to our database and supply access to our models. The CLI references config/database.js to know what to connect to itself. Both files use our environment variables configured above.

Running

To give it some life, run foreman start web.

Debugging

To run the app in debugger mode, do the following:

1. Start the app with foreman start webDebug.
2. Open chrome and navigate to chrome://inspect in the address bar.
3. Click the Open dedicated DevTools for Node

This window will pause on all breakpoints, etc.

When you kill and restart node, the window will automatically reconnect to it.

Console (Terminal) Usage

You can also access a terminal console for our node app by running node console.js in the terminal. From here you will have access to any modules attached to the REPL context. Currently this is basic DB access through Sequelize.

Development

Hitting the API

Use Postman (Google it) with Chrome to play with the API without the mobile app.

To authenticate through the API, login using username and password at api/v1/login and store the response token.

To make requests to authenticated routes, include a Header with the key Authorization and the value JWT <token string> in your HTTP request.

Database changes

Database changes with sequelize are a little bit painful and you need to follow a strict routine in order to keep things sane. Essentially the flow is as follows (Reference the sequelize documentation, http://docs.sequelizejs.com/, for more):

Creating a new Model/Table

1. Start by using the CLI to create a new migration for your new model.

sequelize model:create --name MyModel --attributes someString:string,someBoolean:boolean

2. Find the newly created migration in db/migrate and modify its up and down blocks.
3. Migrate the database to create your new table.

sequelize db:migrate

4. Create a new model file, api/models/my_model.js, and describe your table (yes, again) including other details like class methods, instance methods, associations, etc. Think of the migration as a way to tell sequelize, the CLI, how to build your table in postgres, and the file in api/models as a way to describe it to sequelize as represented for use in the node app. It's kind of sucky but that's sequelize.

NOTE When "describing" the table in the migration, you should pretty much just focus on things like attribute names, their types, whether or not they are unique, whether or not they can be null, and their default values if they have them. Things like validation and other details don't seem to be necessary until describing your model in the api/models model file.

Modifying an existing Model/Table

1. Start by using the CLI to create a new migration for your changes.

sequelize migration:create --name=add-some-attribute-to-my-model

2. Open the newly created migration in db/migrate and modify its up and down blocks.
3. Migrate the database to modify your table.

sequelize db:migrate

4. Open your model file, api/models/my_model.js and modify its description to match the changes you described in your migration file. Think of the migration as a way to tell sequelize, the CLI, how to build your table in postgres, and the file in api/models as a way to describe it to sequelize as represented for use in the node app. It's kind of sucky but that's sequelize.

NOTE When "describing" the table in the migration, you should pretty much just focus on things like attribute names, their types, whether or not they are unique, whether or not they can be null, and their default values if they have them. Things like validation and other details don't seem to be necessary until describing your model in the api/models model file.

AWS

We will need to update this later but for now, during development if you need to test transcoding, SNS callbacks, or anything else that interacts with the server via AWS, you'll need to run ngrok (http://ngrok.com) pointed at the port your server is running on (likely: ngrok http 5000) and update the subscription in the SNS settings, which likely means deleting the old one and creating a new one. This blows I know. Ill come up with something else later. The "address" should be something like this http://2a50f4e8.ngrok.io/api/v1/transcode_complete_webhook for our transcode completion webhook, for example.