Practice making http requests on your local machine
This tutorial will explain how to use Postman to send requests to ourserver
First clone down the sandpox-api repo
git clone https://github.com/jmarthernandez/sandbox-api
Next make sure that we are in the sandbox-api directory and run
npm install
What this does is install all of the required modules(things we need) for our express server to run. The main three are express and body-parser. Express is a framework that lets us spin up servers very quickly. Body-parser allows our express server to read the requests that Postman will be sending
The last thing we need to do is run the command
node app.js
This will start our server. Now we can make requests to it.
Postman is availible as a chrome extension so go ahead and install that.
##Endpoints
GET localhost:4000/messages
Returns an array of all the messages in the database
POST localhost:4000/messages/
Adds a message to the database
GET localhost:4000/messages/:messageNumber
Retrieves a message from database
or returns an error stating message doesn't exist
PUT localhost:4000/messages/:messageNumber
Updates a message to the database
or returns an error stating message doesn't exist
Delete localhost:4000/messages/:messageNumber
Deletes a specific message from the database
or returns an error stating message doesn't exist
***** :messageNumber is an actual number.
In Postman we will be using x-www-form-urlencoded whenever we POST or PUT to our server. Whenever we POST or PUT we will be using message as our key and whatever you want for the value.
Try playing around with the different HTTP methods and endpoints. Also, there are comments throughout the source code that give a little more context.
Have fun!