WSO Backend Onboarding

About this Repository

A Williams student began developing a user management system for WSO, but never finished it. Your task is to complete the backend implementation by filling in the missing code. Follow the instructions to learn how to complete the project.

Setting Up Your Dev Environment

What you need:

• A code editor (e.g. VSCode or GoLand)
• Git
• Go

You can download VSCode here

If you are on Mac I would highly recommend installing Homebrew (a package manager)

• Copy the code on the Brew Homepage to a terminal
• Now you have brew installed and can get packages by typing brew install [package name]

If you are on Windows you should install Chocolatey (also a package manager)

• follow the install direcitons on install Chocolatey (make sure open Windows PowerShell as an administratior)
• Now you have choco installed and can get packages by typing choco install [package name]
• run choco install make so you can start the local server

If you don't have Git installed:

• If you have brew installed type brew install git in a terminal
• If you don't follow the download instructions here based on your OS

If you don't have Go installed

• If you have brew installed type brew install go in a terminal
• If you don't you can download Go here (make sure to download the Installer for the OS and architecture of your computer)

Now you are ready for onboarding!

Clone and Run the Server

To clone the repo navigate into the directory of your choice and run:

git clone https://github.com/WilliamsStudentsOnline/onboarding-backend.git

To start the server, simply run:

make run

and to quit, use the keyboard shortcut control + C

Structure of this repository

• cmd This stores the entry point for the server under main.go
• docs This is where auto-generated documentation is stored
• internal This is where the actual private logic is stored
  • router Here we define the endpoint groups and set up the root router
  • users Here endpoints related to users and their respective handler function
  • admin Here are endpoints that require admin authorization and their respective handler function
  • fakedatabase This is where our (fake) user database logic is stored.
• model This stores the defined structs for requests/responses and data models

Gin

Gin is a framework that allows us to build highly efficient servers. It works around the idea of a gin.Context. A context is a wrapper for a http request instance. It stores all the information received from a request, and all the necessary information to respond to it as well. Every time a request is made, we call one of the functions that takes in a gin.Context. That funciton, uses the context to respond to the request.

API Testing & Debugging

You can send a HTTP request to your local server by calling

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/<endpoint>

Here, `-X GET` specifies the HTTP method.

For example,

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/ping

Tasks

Part 1

Curretly if you run the server and make a GET request to the ping endpoint,

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/ping

You would get back pong. We want to change this, so that it returns Hello World!. You first task, is to find ping API handler, and modify it's response.

Part 2

We have a database called fakedatabase that stores our WSO users and their favorite colors. Currently, there is no way for us to add any new users to the database. Luckily another WSO member has created an edit user endpoint, however it's not working correctly.

When we run

curl -X POST \
  http://localhost:8080/api/v1/admin/edit \
  -H 'authorization: Basic Zm9vOmJhcg==' \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"user":"Ye","color":"Blue"}'

it is supposed to add the corresponding entry to the database.

Note that Zm9vOmJhcg== is base64("foo:bar") and we are using Basic Auth to authenticate users to this endpoint.

Part 3

Now that we can add users, we want a way to query our database for a given user's favorite color. We want to make a request like so

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/api/v1/user/Ye

and get the information back in a JSON format like

{
  "user": "Ye",
  "color": "Blue"
}

with a success http status code (200). If the user is not found, return an empty JSON with not found status code (404). Find the GET user endpoint, and modify it to query the database for the given name and return a JSON like above.

Note that you can use our pre-defined structs for constructing jsons (they have pre-defined json bindings)

Part 4

Now that our server is fully implemented, let's generate the documentation for it. As you probabably noticed, there are a bunch of annotations above each gin.Context function. These annotations are used to autogenerate a documentation website for us. To generate the documentation, run:

make swag

NOTE YOU MAY HAVE TO INSTALL SWAG

And to see your documentation, start up the server and navigate to http://localhost:8080/swagger/index.html. From here, you can actually test out your endpoints right there in the browser! Play around with it, and try to make it execute the same endpoints as the ones you ran using curl.