Web Dossier: Backend

Intro

This is the backend of the JSDOM-React scraper app. This is an ExpressJS-based server that uses JSDOM to scrape websites on command and passes back analytics data from what it retrieved.

Dependencies

• NodeJS & npm

Getting Started

1. Run npm install
2. Run npm run build to transpile the Typescript (you must do this before the server Javascript code will update)
3. Run npm run dev|testprod|prod depending on the server mode you want to activate.
   • dev will run the Javascript code with nodemon, so it will restart the server every time you run npm run build. This is convenient, but nodemon is not performant for production environments.
   • prod and testprod are both run with plain node, and there are currently no differences between them.
     • If persistent data is added, these two will probably be different in what data (production versus seeded development data) that they access, and otherwise behave the same