WEBSITE DOWN. The flights api in use has since been taken offline from RapidAPI, breaking some fundamental functionality of this website project. Some weird bugs present too that might be due to some other APIs going down that I'm unsure of. Unfortunately, the website will be staying down for now.

Such a shame to discover when doing some maintenence on older projects. Thanks for the hard work team!

http://packadvisor.herokuapp.com/

Installing Node and Modules

This link shows how to install node.js with npm (which is the package manager for node) on Windows. Then we need to install a couple packages for our project using npm. Use the following commands:

npm install -g express
npm install -g node-sass

Running Node

To run the project, navigate to the root directory of the project and use the command node index.js to start the node server. To connect to it, open localhost:3000 in any web browser and it should work. Reading through index.js is pretty straightforward. We basically use a module called express to start a server and then handle the GET requests for different html pages. Note that we are listening on the port 3000. This is where we will provide each page with the data needed.

File organization

All the front end stuff is located in the frontEnd folder. Html files are in the html folder, javascript in js and css files in the css folder. Instead of css, we are using "sass" which is just fancier and nicer css. These files have an extension of ".scss". Only edit these when editing the css files. The sass interpreter will be installed via node as described above. To generate the css from scss, use the command:

sass --watch globalStyles.scss globalStyles.css

This will watch the globalStyles.scss file for further changes and keep converting to css. Replace globalStyles.scss with other scss files to convert them to scss. Scss really helps in saving variables and making faster changes.