Chrappy

A Secret Santa App

Why

What

How

Stages of development

1. Serve a few pages.
   Write tests for status code and title string for each
2. Add users to database
   • Create database build files
   • Database queries (insert user, get user)
   • Also write tests for database queries
3. Link login and registration pages to database
4. Add groups to database
   • Display groups on groups page
   • Ability to create groups
   • " edit groups
   • Invite people

Running locally

Start both the node server and the react server:

npm run dev

Things I Learnt

• travis 'install' stage is where npm install happens - so be careful if you override this in .travis.yml
• To stop database connections from hanging, use pg pool's end method to close the connection see docs
  (there are restrictions on when you can do this - maybe not more than once for a given pool?)
• To be able to run a module from the command line:

  if(require.main == module)
    yourFunction();
  
• When using supertest for post requests, use the .send method to include form data, and .type('form') to populate req.body with that data (you also need to be using body-parser for this to work) e.g.:

  supertest(app)
    .post('/login')
    .type('form')
    .send({ email: 'my@email.com', password: 'top secret' })
    .end(blah blah blah);
  
• When hashing passwords, use the bcrypt module rather than inbuilt crypto. bcrypt is designed for hashing passwords and is more computationally expensive (harder to brute force), and a work factor can be provided so it can be made more expensive as computers get faster.
• The jsonwebtoken module is synchronous under the hood, despite offering an async API #11

Resources

• Promise Anti-Patterns
• Using pg-promises
• Mistakes with promises
• Bcrypt for password storage
• Many to many relationships in PostgreSQL