Getting started

Install dependencies

• Install Node v8.x and npm v5.x if you haven't already (nvm or n are create tools for this)
• Next, install the dependencies from package.json with

  $ npm install

• To keep things easy, install a few global dependencies:

  $ npm install -g webpack knex

Set up a local Postgres database

• Install Postgres if you haven't already (see Installing Postgres via Brew)
• Optional: Install a Postgres client (see Postico or PSequel)
• Create a database (this will be your $BLOG_DB_NAME environment variable)
  • Or in SQL, with psql -c CREATE DATABASE [insert_dev_db_name_here];
  • This can either be done with createdb [insert_dev_db_name_here]
• Optional: Test your database credentials by connecting to the newly created database in your Postgres client
• Using these credentials, add your database environment variables to your ~/.bash_profile, or wherever you store them. This is required for the knexfile.js
• Set your $NODE_ENV environment variable to dev, so that the knexfile knows which configuration to use

For reference, my local environment variables look like this in my ~/.bash_profile file:

  # Node environment
  export NODE_ENV='dev'

  # DB credentials
  export BLOG_DB_PORT=5432
  export BLOG_DB_HOST='localhost'
  export BLOG_DB_NAME='blog' # this should match the db you created above
  export BLOG_DB_USER=''
  export BLOG_DB_PW=''

Run the app

Migrate the database, build the client, and run the server:

$ npm start

which is the same as:

$ npm run db:migrate              # Ensures the db is up to date with latest migrations
$ npm run build                   # Builds the React client
$ node server/javascript/index.js # Runs the Node/Express server

Go to localhost:8000 (or whatever $PORT you set) to check that the app is running.

Development

The current focus of this project is in the server/javascript directory for the API, and the client/reactdirectory for the client.

To simply start the server, run:

$ npm run dev

This will serve the contents of the client/react/build directory, which are built with Webpack.

To run Webpack in --watch mode, run:

$ npm run watch

And that should be it! Happy hacking 🤓