CSSP Mock API

⚠️ Moved to Render since Heroku removed free tier → https://ccsp-api.onrender.com/

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This repository contains the code for generating the mock API the ccsp-experiment prototype depends on.

The prototype runs on github pages but requires this API. It's currently running on my personal Heroku account at https://ccsp-api.herokuapp.com/ The API contains mock data generated with faker.js, so there are no privacy issues.

The following instructions assume you have node.js and npm installed on your system.

Running the API locally

The API consists of an api.json file served with json-server

to run it on localhost:3000, type

npm run-script serve-api

api.json is generated by the make-api.js file, to regenerate type

npm run-script make-api

to regenerate and build in one step (live life to the fullest), you can execute

npm run-script make-api

• At the time of writing the API url is hardcoded to an Heroku app in ccsp-experiment. I plan to let ccsp-experiment app look for the API at localhost:3000, when the app itself is served from localhost in the future.

The output in the terminal will show the available API resources (i.e. employees, spouses, children, applications, awards). For more information on what the API server can do, consult the json-server README.md file. Spoiler alert: pagination, filtering, search, routing, slicing, etc. are available, as are the GET, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE HTTP methods.

Operators can be tacked on as query parameters. E.g. This call to employees will return the third page (collection sliced by 10 items/page) of the collection with the "id referenced" children, spouse, and applications items embedded in the JSON.

http://localhost:3000/employees?_embed=children&_embed=applications&_embed=spouses&_page=3

Deploying the API to a Heroku account

1. Create an account on
   https://heroku.com

2. Install the Heroku CLI on your computer:
   https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli

3. Connect the Heroku CLI to your account by writing the following command in your terminal and follow the instructions on the command line:

heroku login

4. Then create a remote Heroku project

heroku create

This will create a project on Heroku with a random name. If you want to name your app you have to supply a name:

heroku create app-name

5. Add the heroku remote to your clone of this repository (substitute app-name with your choice)

git remote add heroku https://git.heroku.com/app-name.git

I added this repository as well (assuming you're using SSH instead of HTTPS)

git remote add origin [email protected]:jandw/ccsp-api.git

6. Check your remotes are properly set up

git remote -v

should output this in the terminal

origin	[email protected]:jandw/ccsp-api.git (fetch)
origin	[email protected]:jandw/ccsp-api.git (push)
heroku	https://git.heroku.com/jans-test.git (fetch)
herolu	https://git.heroku.com/jans-test.git (push)

7. If needed, build the API and commit it

npm run-script make-api && git add -A && git commit -m "API build"

8. Push the API to heroku

git push -u heroku master

This also sets up tracking, so in the future, you should be able to just use git push to deploy. Next, push the changes to github.mit.edu/jandw/ccsp-api

git push origin master

You should see the push, followed by terminal output regarding the heroku build of the api

9. Visit the newly created app by opening it via heroku:

heroku open

10. If something went wrong, check the logs:

heroku logs --tail

11. To delete the herokuapp

heroku apps:destroy app-name