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!