UCLA Radio API

The API for UCLA Radio's website and mobile apps. It's powered by an Express server with a PostgreSQL backend and a GraphQL endpoint.

Technologies Used

TODO

Services Used

TODO

Structure

uclaradio-api/
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── bin
│   └── www
├── dist
│   ├── app.js
│   ├── app.js.map
│   ├── controllers
│   ├── errorHandling.js
│   ├── errorHandling.js.map
│   ├── models
│   └── routes
├── package.json
├── schema.graphql
├── src
│   ├── app.ts
│   ├── controllers
│   ├── errorHandling.ts
│   ├── models
│   └── routes
├── tsconfig.json
├── yarn-error.log
└── yarn.lock

The UCLA Radio API follows an MVC pattern.

Models are defined in the models folder.

Controllers are stored in the controllers folder.

Note that test files are put in the same directory as the respective file they test and have the extension .test.ts.

Contributing

Prerequisites

There are a couple of programs and files this project depends on that you'll need to have installed to run it locally.

1. Node – You can install this with a simple brew install node on macOS.
2. Yarn – Yarn is a JavaScript package manager, and an alternative to npm. We prefer it to npm because it has a couple of nice features such as caching, lockfiles, and faster downloads.
3. Visual Studio Code – VS Code is an open source text editor built by Microsoft and has amazing tooling support for TypeScript projects (as well as a lot of other awesome features!). You can use any text editor you want, but VS Code will give you a nice experience :).
4. PostgreSQL – Postgres is the database we use. Installing it locally can be a little daunting, so check out our guide below if you're unfamiliar with it!
5. A .env file – It's good practice to store things like API keys and database information with environment variables so that they can easily be changed for different environments without code changes. This is cool, but when you have a lot of configuration variables it can become hard to manage, so we use a package called dotenv that reads configuration data from a file called .env and puts them into process.env. Check out our guide below for an example .env.

Installing PostgreSQL

Mac

You want to install Postgres through Homebrew.

brew install postgres

Then start Postgres with the command:

brew services start postgresql

If you have any issues starting up Postgres, refer to this handy StackOverflow post.

Verify Postgres is working by accessing psql, an admin utility that is installed with Postgres:

psql postgres

For reference, you can stop postgres at any time with brew services stop postgresql. You don't want to do that right now, though!

Instead, you'll want to create UCLA Radio's database. We call ours uclaradio.

createdb uclaradio

You'll also want to create a dummy database used for testing. It's called uclaradio-test.

createdb uclaradio-test

Note that by default, the Postgres user is your computer's username (e.g., nathan) and there is no password. When creating your .env file, the values will look something like:

DATABASE_HOST=localhost
DATABASE_USER=nathan
DATABASE_PASSWORD=
...
(other values)
...

Dope.

For development, you may also find it useful to use a GUI client to visualize the database. There a lot of great options, but we recommend PSequel!

Run the following command to populate the uclaradio database with our tables and test data:

yarn setup

If the script hangs, press CTRL+C and run the above command again.

Windows

We're working on this! If you know how to install Postgres on Windows, please make a pull request!

Example .env File

Please make an .env file with the following values:

DATABASE_HOST=
DATABASE_USER=
DATABASE_PASSWORD=

Database Objects

Users Shows Songs (Rivendell) Messages (Rivendell)