DEVELOPING.md

Developer's Guide

Brief guide to setup the Loopback REST application in your local system. A lando working setup will be needed.

Setting up the system

• move to your project's folder, and start lando: lando start
• copy the sample general local configuration:

  cp src/env.local.ts.template src/env.local.ts

  and if needed change the relevant values.
• copy the sample datasource local configuration:

  cp src/datasources/mysql.datasource.local.ts.template src/datasources/mysql.datasource.local.ts

• set database connection data into this file; if the .lando.yml file was not change, this configuration should work:

    export const config = {
      name: 'mysql',
      connector: 'mysql',
      url: 'mysql://mean:[email protected]:32770/mean',
      host: '127.0.0.1',
      port: 32770,
      user: 'mean',
      password: 'mean',
      database: 'mean'
    };

• obtain and import a SQL dump of the database [TODO: expand on this...]:

    lando db-import ./path/to/database/dump.sql

• once the machine is up and running, build the node dependencies: npm ci
• try building the application: npm run build
• check if database migrations are needed: npm run migrate
• start the API: npm run start
• the API should be live on http://127.0.0.1:4321 (or different host/port in case you customized the env.local.ts file)
• try exploring the API on http://127.0.0.1:4321/explore

Starting / stopping the server

to start:

• start lando: lando start
• (re)build if needed: npm run build
• start the server: npm run start

to stop:

• stop the running npm server process
• stop lando: lando stop

Using Loopback 4 cli tool

Loopback 4 command line tool is installed in the lando environment at machine build, and exposed thru the tool lb4; to run lb4 command, just prefix them with the lando keyword, eg. lando lb4 model, lando lb4 controller, etc.

Tools

Any configurable HTTP tool can be use to test the API - even curl - although a GUI tools (as Insomnia) can be extremely useful.