Assignment 1: HTTP Requests
This assignment gives you practice using HTTP requests to your local server. Feel free to use Postman or Insonmia to run these requests. Remember, Google is your friend! Since you're all starting to learn this infrastructure, rely on ChatGPT as little as possible so you actually remember how to do these things!
Now that you have your server running, you should see a landing page with a small library of books. Our task is to find a way to manage this library! We want to
retrieve the list of books
add a new book
update an existing catalog entry
remove a book
Which HTTP request corresponds to which action?
Your Task
Look through server.js. This should contain all the existing server code that exposes these possible actions to a user.
Additionally, to give you some more context, there's a database file that's cleared and repopulated every time the server restarts. If you restart the server, you will clear the database!
Based on the code in the file, please write the following:
a request to get all the books
add a new book to the library
update the author of an existing book
remove a book from the library
You may do this in several ways:
Postman/Insomnia provides a user-friendly way to make these requests. Feel free to search wherever to learn how to use these tools
Write Python, JavaScript, or any other code to make these requests. Postman also generates code for you, so you might find that feature helpful.
Write cURL requests. These are much harder for people to read but they work!
Some tips:
You may want to figure out what the data structure looks like for each database entry, or what data structure is used in general. Hint: they look pretty similar to Python dictionaries! Which fields are critical to operation?
Feel free to try as many things out as you want. Since everything is local to your computer and the database resets on server restart, nothing destructive will happen!
Changing code:
If you locate any errors, improvements, or code changes, please follow our workflow! Branch, modify your code, commit, then make a PR and one of the project leads will review it!
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