Overview

The main goal of this project is to learn and gain experience in developing a web app from scratch. This project was created based on the code-alongs on Udemy's Web Developer Bootcamp course by Colt Steele.

There are some bugs/improvements I still have to address as shown in the Issues tab, so I will try to improve this web app as time goes on!

Technologies Used

• HTML/CSS/Javascript/EJS
• Bootstrap
• NodeJS & NPM
• Express
• MongoDB & Mongoose
• Other notable APIs/services/libraries:
  • Passport
  • Cloudinary
  • MapBox
  • Helmet

The course uses slightly older versions of tools mentioned above, but I made sure to use the most recent versions as of January 2022. A lot of research/troubleshooting involved to change the syntax/usages, but definitely worth it. :)

Key concepts that I have learned from this project

• Using frontend tools
• RESTful APIs: Basic CRUD
• Working with NoSQL databases
• Applying authentication & authorization
• Using sessions & cookies
• Importance of security
• Using APIs/libs/frameworks & documentation

Developing / testing on local

Ensure that yelp-camp db exists on local mongodb

mongo
show dbs

Sample output

yelp-camp         0.000GB

Update app.js to use the local mongodb server

const dbUrl = 'mongodb://localhost:27017/yelp-camp';

Deploying on Heroku

Go to local app's top level folder

cd <path-to-local-app-repo>

Login and follow instructions in the browser

heroku login

If this is the first deployment, create an empty app

heroku create

Check if heroku remote repo was added

git remote -v

Generally, I commit any changes to my personal account first

git add .
git commit -m "commit message"
git push origin main

And deploy!

git push heroku main

Tests

This project does not have any unit/integration tests. Most of the tests I have done is through the browser and console. For behind the scenes testing, I used python's requests lib.

Eg., Some "bad" POST/PATCH requests are not possible through the browser due to client-side validation I have set up. So to test server-side validation, I have to send requests without the browser:

import requests
r = requests.post('http://localhost:3000/campgrounds', {'bad_key': 'bad_value'})
r.content   # Show page contents