Readcommend

Readcommend is a book recommendation web app for the true book aficionados and disavowed human-size bookworms. It allows to search for book recommendations with best ratings, based on different search criteria.

Instructions

The front-end single-page app has already been developed using Node/TypeScript/React (see /app) and a PostgreSQL database with sample data is also provided (see /migrate.*). Your mission - if you accept it - is to implement a back-end microservice that will fetch the data from the database and serve it to the front-end app.

• In the service directory, write a back-end microservice in the language of your choice (with a preference for Go, if you know it) that listens on http://localhost:5000.
• Write multiple REST endpoints, all under the /api/v1 route, as specified in the /open-api.yaml swagger file.
• The most important endpoint, /books, must return book search results in order of descending ratings (from 5.0 to 1.0 stars) and filtered according to zero, one or multiple user selected criteria: author(s), genre(s), min/max pages, start/end publication date (the "era"). A maximum number of results can also be specified.
• It's OK to use libraries for http handling/routing and SQL (ie: query builders), but try to refrain from relying heavily on end-to-end frameworks (ie: Django) and ORMs that handle everything and leave little room to showcase your coding skills! ;)
• Write some documentation (ie: at the end of this file) to explain how to deploy and run your service.
• Keep your code simple, clean and well-organized.
• If you use Git during development (and we recommend you do!), please ensure your repo is configured as private to prevent future candidates from finding it.
• When you are done, please zip your entire project (excluding the .git hidden folder if any) and send the archive to us for review.
• Don't hesitate to come back to us with any questions along the way. We prefer that you ask questions, rather than assuming and misinterpreting requirements.
• You have no time limit to complete this exercise, but the more time you take, the higher our expectations in terms of quality and completeness.
• You will be evaluated mainly based on how well you respect the above instructions. However, we understand that you may have a life (some people do), so if you don't have the time to respect all instructions, simply do your best and focus on what you deem most important.

Development environment

Docker Desktop

Make sure you have the latest version of Docker Desktop installed, with sufficient memory allocated to it, otherwise you might run into errors such as:

app_1         | Killed
app_1         | npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
app_1         | npm ERR! errno 137.

If that happens, first try running the command again, but if it doesn't help, try increasing the amount of memory allocated to Docker in Preferences > Resources.

Starting front-end app and database

In this repo's root dir, run this command to start the front-end app (on port 8080) and PostgreSQL database (on port 5432):

$ docker-compose up --build

(later you can press Ctrl+C to stop this docker composition when you no longer need it)

Wait for everything to build and start properly.

Creating and seeding database tables

In another terminal window, run this command to create and seed the PostgreSQL database:

$ ./migrate.sh

Connecting to database

During development, you can connect to and experiment with the PostgreSQL database by running this command:

$ ./psql.sh

To exit the PostgreSQL session, type \q and press ENTER.

Accessing front-end app

Point your browser to http://localhost:8080

Be patient, the first time it might take up to 1 or 2 minutes for parcel to build and serve the front-end app.

You should see the front-end app appear, with all components displaying error messages because the back-end service does not exist yet.

Deploying and running back-end microservice

To start the backend service , ensure the app is ready and database is running. You should see a message that database system is ready to accept connection from the logs when you start the front and database.

Then , you can start the backend in another terminal window.

Navigate to the readcommendapi folder.

$ cd .. service/readcommendapi

Build

$ docker build . -t readcommendapi

Run

$ docker run -p 5000:5000 readcommendapi

Send "http://localhost:5000/api/vi/books" on your browser and that should return all the books in the database.

Your app is ready for use. You can now reload http://localhost:8080 and you can get your book recommendations.

Thank you.

Test

$ go test -v ./test/...