Module introduction & source code installation

If you want to make it easy for developers to maintain your API, it's essential that you provide quality documentation.

In this module, we'll be adding doc blocks directly to the source code and using these doc blocks to generate a live, documentation site.

apiDoc

To document our backend API, we're going to use a tool called apiDoc. This tool will read the doc blocks in our source code and extract special parameters that we can add to indicate the features of the API, for example, the inputs and outputs of our endpoints, the headers required, the format returned and so on.

The site generated by apiDoc will beautifully organize the key information needed by our development team to use and maintain the PrintBay API.

Source code installation

As I mentioned in the previous video, this course is a continuation from my course Full-Stack Vue + Node.

Why it's important to be aware of this is that we'll be using the same case-study project, development environment, and source code for this course.

So rather than repeating the installation instructions, I'm going to direct you to watch videos 2, 3, and 4 from that course.

I'll put the link below this video and I recommend you go watch those video now before continuing.

Course branch

Alright, I'm assuming you've got the source code installed. Now, go ahead and check out the branch module_10_start by going to the terminal and typing:

$ git checkout module_10_start
$ npm i

Once that's done, make sure you've got a dot env file and that your database has been seeded.

In the next lesson, we'll be setting up apiDoc.