Week 1

This week is an introduction to Node.js, Express, and unit testing with Jest. The focus of this week will be on getting comfortable with the development environment, tools, and best practices in back-end development.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this week, a student should:

be able to navigate an Express API and understand what it does
know how to run a local Express server and test its endpoints manually
be comfortable reading and working with unit tests
be able to build a simple in-memory REST API

The assignment

The assignment this week is designed to get you comfortable working in an Express server. It is not meant to be particularly challening, but simply to get you aquainted with a project of the type we will be working in during this course. It contains a simple set of REST endpoints for a generic data type (items). You will complete this REST API.

Getting started

Make sure you have a recent version of Node.js installed on your computer. I am using Node v12.16, but anything above 12 will be fine.
Ensure you have git and github set up on your computer. If you do not, please follow this guide: https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github.
Fork this repository and clone it locally.
In your terminal, from inside this project directory, run npm install to install the project dependencies.
Run npm start to start your local server. You should see a logged statement telling you Server is listening on http://localhost:5000.
Download Postman or API client of your choice. Browse the various endpoints (8 in total) contained in this project. Practice calling all of them and getting 200 HTTP responses.
Run the unit tests of this project: npm test. Your test output should end in something like this:

Test Suites: 4 failed, 4 total
Tests:       9 failed, 13 passed, 22 total

Your task

As you can see, there is a simple set of unit tests for this project's routes. However, the routes have not been fully implemented yet. Your task is to implement the route definitions and DAO functions required to get all the tests to pass. To get full credit for this assignment, you all tests must pass without any changes.

Grading

Component	Points
All tests, as originally given, are passing.	80
Clear, organized project structure	20

Submission

Create a pull request (PR) from your repository to the main branch of this repository. Make your name the title of the PR.
Continuous Integration is handled using Github Actions. This will automatically run your tests and show the results on your PR. If you see a red X and a message saying All checks have failed then you will not receive full credit. Ensure all tests are passing in order to receive full marks.