🦋 Butterfly critique

Butterfly critique is an API designed for butterfly enthusiasts. So far, it's an express-based API that stores butterflies and users.

Data persistence is through a JSON-powered database called lowdb.

Validation is built using an assertion library called @mapbox/fusspot.

Task

Butterfly critique is already a pretty great API, but we think it would be even better if it let users critique butterflies. Your task is to create new API endpoints that:

Allow a user to rate butterflies on a scale of 0 through 5
Allow retrieval of a list of a user's rated butterflies, sorted by rating

You should also provide a small write-up that explains the decisions (for instance, the HTTP verbs for new endpoints) and trade-offs you made. If you add any new dependencies, spend some time talking about why you chose them.

You are free to refactor or improve any code you think should be refactored, but please include a note about such changes in your write-up. Any changes you make should be scoped and explained as though you are opening a pull request against an existing codebase used in a production API service.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us!

What we're looking for

Your code should be extensible and reusable
Your code should be well tested
Your code should be tidy and adhere to conventions
Your changes should be well-scoped and explained in the write-up
Your write-up should be thoughtful and coherent

❗️ Note: please do not write your name anywhere in your solution, since this prevents us from evaluating it anonymously.

Scoring rubric

You will be scored on the following aspects of your work:

Endpoint implementation
Endpoint design
Appropriate testing of new code
Tidiness and adherence to conventions
Appropriate refactoring
Communication in the write-up

0 = poor 1 = adequate 2 = exceptional

The maximum possible score is 12.

Developing

Requirements

Node v14.x
npm v6

Setup

Install dependencies with:

npm install

If you need to recreate the butterflies database, you can run:

npm run init-db

Running

To run the application locally:

npm start

You should see a message that the application has started:

Butterfly API started at http://localhost:8000

You can manually try out the application using curl:

# GET a butterfly
curl http://localhost:8000/butterflies/xRKSdjkBt4

# POST a new butterfly
curl -X POST -d '{"commonName":"Brimstone", "species":"Gonepteryx rhamni", "article":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonepteryx_rhamni"}' -H 'content-type: application/json' http://localhost:8000/butterflies

# GET a user
curl http://localhost:8000/users/OOWzUaHLsK

For developing, you can run the application with auto-restarts on code changes using:

npm run watch

Testing

This project uses jest as its testing framework. If you are unfamiliar with jest, check out its documentation.

This project has eslint and a custom config @mapbox/eslint-config-mapbox setup for code linting.

To run the linter and all tests:

npm test

For developing, you can run jest with auto-restarts using:

npm run test-watch

aceisScope/ButterflyAPI