Better Express API Structure

Introduction

• In today's node development, most of the time we tend to create an web api server and all the things around it (mostly).
• We have a certain steps of work needs to be done before actually work on your project, like creating the web server, attaching the api endpoints to it, error handling middlewares and all.
• Also, it have to be in proper structure with all the things segregated from one another.
• To do all this things we utilize the first couple of hours in it.
• Bonus steps will be added to create the development with typescript.
• So, to eradicate this problem, I have created this repository.

Overview

• This is a web server with typescript.
• Below are the packages used in this project.
  • express : Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js
  • cookie-parser : To get the cookies from the request in the request.cookies.
  • cors : To enable CORS.
  • morgan : HTTP request logger middleware.
  • dotenv : To load the environment variables from .env files into process.env.
  • swagger-jsdoc : Reads the JSDoc-annotated source code and generates an OpenAPI(Swagger) specification.
  • swagger-ui-express : To serve auto-generated swagger-ui generated API docs from express.
  • helmet : To secure the app by setting various HTTP headers.
  • express-bouncer : To mitigate brute-force attacks.
• To run the typescript in development, I used the nodemon + ts-node combo.

Usage

• The application provides some scripts for building and running the application in development and production.

    "dev": "nodemon src/app.ts",
    "pre-build": "rm -rf ./dist/",
    "build": "npm run pre-build && tsc -p . && npm run post-build",
    "post-build": "cp -r ./src/public ./dist/public",
    "start": "node dist/app.js"

• Update the .env as per your configuration.

• Also, when you use nodemon for debugging/hot-reloading the application, please change the APP_ENVIRONMENT to development.

# .env
APP_ENVIRONMENT=development

• /swagger to get the swagger API documentation page, where all the dummy api will be shown.

Check the .env for the APP_ENVIRONMENT value, change the value as in development or production

Open Issues

• Don't know which will be good practice to export and imports.
• Configure Cookie Parser for the following in typescript

app.use(cookieParser(COOKIE_SECRET, {
  secure: true,
  httpOnly: true,
  domain: DOMAIN,
  expires:
}));

Next Steps

• Improvise the project by establishing some security aspects of node.

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For any suggestions, or bugs, please raise issues.