Timestamp Microservice
This simple microservice responds with the Unix and UTC timestamp for any valid time (milliseconds or YYYY-MM-DD) sent to it.
I built this little website for freeCodeCamp’s first APIs and Microservices Projects.
This was my first time building a microservice and it was a good first step in learning how to correctly set up my project in a Node- and Express-based environment. I learned a lot working through this one, and no doubt, I’ll continue to learn a lot working through the subsequent APIs and Microservices Projects.
User Stories
The brief for the Timestamp Microservice project was as follows:
- The API endpoint is GET [project_url]/api/timestamp/:date_string?
- A date string is valid if can be successfully parsed by new Date(date_string). Note that the unix timestamp needs to be an integer (not a string) specifying milliseconds. In our test we will use date strings compliant with ISO-8601 (e.g. “2016-11-20”) because this will ensure an UTC timestamp.
- If the date string is empty it should be equivalent to trigger new Date(), i.e. the service uses the current timestamp.
- If the date string is valid the api returns a JSON having the structure
{"unix": <date.getTime()>, "utc" : <date.toUTCString()> }e.g.{"unix": 1479663089000 ,"utc": "Sun, 20 Nov 2016 17:31:29 GMT"} - If the date string is invalid the api returns a JSON having the structure
{"error" : "Invalid Date" }.