The picture above depicts our ER Diagram for our database. We chose a relational database (PostgreSQL) because the information that we used when identifying our entities had many relationships with each other. It consists of 5 tables: students, professors, courses, professor courses, and stat tracker.

On the backend of the app, we use a locally run server to allow the frontend to request information from the database that will be used. Information used to connect with the database such as the user and password are hidden and instead, we use environment variables to input this sensitive information. After that, once the server is started, it connects to the database and logs the successful start of the server and the IP address it runs on. When the frontend makes a call to one of the server’s endpoints, like the “/login” endpoint shown below, it checks for the email and password. If they were provided, the database is queried and either returns the student information in JSON format or returns a “Student not found” message if a student with that email and password was not found.