Template for Backend Express

The Golden Rule: 🦸 🦸‍♂️ Stop starting and start finishing. 🏁

If you work on more than one feature at a time, you are guaranteed to multiply your bugs and your anxiety.

Scripts

command	description
npm start	starts the app - should only be used in production as changes will not get reloaded
npm run start:watch	runs the app using nodemon which watches for changes and reloads the app
npm test	runs the tests once
npm run test:watch	continually watches and runs the tests when files are updated
npm run setup-db	runs sql/setup.sql (use a local DB in dev, or set DATABASE_URL for Supabase)

Deploy: Fly.io + Supabase (Postgres)

1. In Supabase, create a project. Copy Settings → Database → connection string (URI) for Node/pg.

2. In Supabase SQL Editor, run sql/setup.sql once (or from this repo, npm run setup-db with that DATABASE_URL in .env).

3. Install the Supabase and Fly CLIs, then fly auth login.

4. Set app in fly.toml to a unique name (or run fly launch and merge the generated fly.toml if you prefer).

5. Set secrets (replace with your values):

   fly secrets set DATABASE_URL="postgresql://..." PGSSLMODE=require JWT_SECRET=... COOKIE_NAME=... SALT_ROUNDS=10 SECURE_COOKIES=true GH_CLIENT_ID=... GH_CLIENT_SECRET=... GH_REDIRECT_URI=... REDIRECT_URL=... API_URL="https://<your-app>.fly.dev"

6. fly deploy

7. Add your Fly app URL to origin in lib/app.js (CORS) and update the GitHub OAuth app redirect/callback + Netlify env if the public URL changed.

8. When traffic looks good, delete the Heroku app and database add-on to stop billing.