Express-Starter

This is a boilerplate/starter project for quickly building an express js server to build a RESTful APIs. It contains what I believe is a good app architecture should be. All suggestions are appreciated! Currently, it has boiler plate code for a 3 layer architecture. More can be found here about Express.js project architecture here on 飞书.

By default, we use MySQL as the database. In this case, since we don't use an ORM, we can make calls directly in the service layer, therefore models/ is left blank.

The database used is MongoDB as it seems more popular in the Express/Node.js world. But if you want to run it, checkout an older readme.md at docs/readme_v1.md

Running

In order to quickly run the project.

1. Install the correct node version using nvm use
2. Install packages using npm install
3. Setup MySQL database server using docker-compose --env-file .env -f docker/docker-compose-mongodb.yml up -d, and create .env file with DB information. Example shown below
4. Create a JWT token using openssl rand -base64 32 or other methods.

PORT=8001

# MongoDB
MONGO_HOST="localhost"
MONGO_PORT="27017"
MONGO_USER="root"
MONGO_PASSWORD="root"
MONGO_DATABASE="test"

JWT_SECRET="secret"
JWT_EXPIRES_IN="1h"

5. Run project using npm run dev.

Project Structure

The project hiearchy is shown below

src\
 |--config\         # Environment variables and configuration related values
 |--controllers\    # Route controllers (controller layer)
 |--docs\           # Swagger files
 |--models\         # Mongoose models (data layer)
 |--schema\         # Contains Mongoose Schemas
 |--routes\         # Routes
 |--services\       # Business logic (service layer)
 |--utils\          # Utility classes and functions
 |--validations\    # Request data validation schemas
 |--app.js          # Express app entry
 |--database.js     # Database connection
 |--middleware.js   # Custom express middleware
tests\              # Contain tests

API Documentation

This sample API has one main resource/component, which has the following paths.

api/v1/auth/login          # POST request
api/v1/auth/register       # POST request
api/v1/auth/login_cache    # GET request
api/v1/users/create_user   # POST request
api/v1/users/get_user      # GET request
api/v1/users/get_users     # GET request
api/v1/users/update_user   # PUT request
api/v1/users/delete_user   # DELETE request

Functionality

This boilerplate includes...

1. 3 Layer Architecture
2. Middleware Support
3. JWT for Authentication
4. Basic Unit and Integration Tests
5. Github Workflow for CI/CD
6. Data Safety - Password Hashing
7. API Documentation with Swagger
8. Simple Redis Login Counter Cache

E2E Testing

Swagger documentation is set up at docs. Remember to use authorization by copying value of authToken from browser cookies to Authorize button after /auth/login or /auth/register has been called.

Middleware

Database

Tips

Here are some more tips.

1. Separate config files based on purpose. db.config.js for database configurement, thirdparty.config.js for third party app configurement, etc...
2. Understand your data layer needs, comparing data driver (handwritten SQL queries) vs ORM models to define how models/ should be used.

TODO

• AWS CloudFormation templating for easy aws deploy
• Pub/Sub Component
• Authorization/Validation
• Loaders logic seperation
• Seperate Model Logic from Controller