Few Notes:

• Make sure you use CMD instead of Powershell (for windows) as the integrated terminal in your VS Code.
• On MAC, If you get permission errors when you run some command, write sudo followed by that same command you tried to run.
• If the touch command does not work, you probably have window run *npm i -g touch-cli. Or simply just create a file manually.*

A set of command steps that you can do manually instead.

• on the terminal run mkdir server this will create a folder called server on your project’s directory. run cd server to change terminal directory to the server folder you created.
• Run npm init -y to initialize a package.json file.
• Install some important packages / libraries that are required for this lab.
  • Express
  • PG
  • CORS
• You can install all three using this command npm i express pg cors
• Install nodemon: npm i -g nodemon

Nodemon is a utility that automatically restarts your server when changes are made to your code. This means that you can make changes to your code and immediately see the effects without having to manually stop and restart the server each time. It is particularly useful during development when you are frequently making changes and testing them.

• Create a file called index.js inside the server folder which also has the previously created package.json the new file is the file entry that is specified in package.json.
• Inside the index.js file, write the following code:

const express = require("express");
const app = express();

let PORT = 5000; // or 3001, 5001, 9000, whichever works

app.listen(PORT, () => {
	console.log(`Server is listening on Port ${PORT}`);
});

• once done, go back to the terminal, ensure that you are in your /server directory and run the following command: nodemon
• The terminal should print out the message that you wanted to log to the console. i.e: Server is listening on Port 5000
• inside index.js you now have to include CORS using the following lines of code. Position them appropriately in the index file
• It is important to specify that the API requests data should be handled in JSON format. through an additional line included below.

What the hell is CORS used for? CORS stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. It is a security feature that restricts web pages or web applications from making requests to a different domain or port than the one that served the original resource. In the context of an Express server, CORS is used to allow a request from a client-side application that is running on a different domain or port to access resources from the server. By enabling CORS, you can specify which domains or ports are allowed to access your server's resources. This is important for security reasons as it helps prevent malicious attacks such as Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).