API REST skeleton JavaScript async/await. MVP for your front-end app

Node.js express.js MongoDB JWT REST API - Basic Project Skeleton

Getting started

This is a basic API REST skeleton written on JavaScript using async/await. Great for building an MVP for your front-end app (Vue, react, angular, or anything that can consume an API)

This project is created to help other developers create a basic REST API in an easy way with Node.js . This basic example shows how powerful and simple JavaScript can be. Do you want to contribute? Pull requests are always welcome to show more features.

Features

• Multiple environment ready (development, production)
• Custom email/password user system with basic security and blocking for preventing brute force attacks.
• Compressed responses.
• Secured HTTP headers.
• CORS ready.
• HTTP request logger in development mode.
• User roles.
• Pagination ready.
• User profile.
• Users list for admin area.
• Cities model and controller example.
• Login access log with IP, browser and country location (for country it looks for the header cf-ipcountry that CloudFlare creates when protecting your website).
• API autogenerated documentation by Postman.
• API collection example for Postman.
• Testing with mocha/chai for API endpoints.
• NPM scripts for cleaning and seeding the MongoDB database.
• NPM script for keeping good source code formatting using prettier and ESLint.
• Use of ESLint for good coding practices.
• Mailer example with Nodemailer and Mailgun.
• JWT Tokens, provide login with Authorization header with value Basic username:password where username:password MUST BE ENCODED with Base64 .
• Make requests with a token after login with Authorization header with value Bearer yourToken where yourToken is the signed and encrypted token given in the response from the login process.

Requirements

• Node.js 8+
• MongoDB 3.6+

How to install

Using Git (recommended)

1. Clone the project from github. Change "myproject" to you project name.

git clone https://github.com/davellanedam/node-express-mongodb-jwt-rest-api-skeleton.git ./myproject

Using manual download ZIP

1. Download repository
2. Uncompress to your desired directory

Install npm dependencies after installing (Git or manual download)

cd myproject
npm install
npm update
npm install nodemon -g

Setting up environments (development or production)

1. In the root this repository you will find a file named .env.example
2. Create a new file by copying and pasting the file and then renaming it to just .env
3. The file .env is already ignored, so you never commit your credentials.
4. Change the values of the file to your environment (development or production)
5. Upload the .env to your environment server(development or production)
6. If you use the postman collection to try the endpoints, change value of the variable server on your environment to the url of your server, for development mode use http://localhost:3000

Mailer

To ensure the deliverability of emails sent by this API, Mailgun is used for mailing users when they sign up, so if you want to use that feature go sign up at their website https://www.mailgun.com

If you want to try a different method it´s ok, I used https://nodemailer.com for this API and they have different transport methods like: smtp.

How to run

Database cleaning and seeding samples

There are 3 available commands for this: fresh , clean and seed .

npm run command

fresh
clean
seed

Running in development mode (lifting API server)

npm run dev

You will know server is running by checking the output of the command npm run dev

****************************
*    Starting Server
*    Port: 3000
*    NODE_ENV: development
*    Database: MongoDB
*    DB Connection: OK
****************************

Running tests

It´s a good practice to do tests at your code, so a sample of how to do that in mocha/chai is also included in the /test directory

npm run test

Formatting code

Format your code with prettier by typing:

npm run format

Usage

Once everything is set up to test API routes either use Postman or any other api testing application. Default username/password combination for login is [email protected]/12345 .

API documentation

https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/487539/RWaHwoLV

Postman API example collection

You can import the example collection to Postman

https://www.getpostman.com/collections/d1e27b60e0ccff22a516

If you use Postman please go to manage environments and then create one for each of your servers (Ex. myApi-LOCAL, myApi-PRODUCTION).

On each of the environments you create you will need to:

1. Create a new key authToken with token value (the token you got from the login process), each time you make a request to the API it will send Authorization header with the token value in the request, you can check this on the headers of users or cities endpoints in the Postman example.
2. Create a second key server with the url of your server, for development mode use http://localhost:3000

This is a REST API, so it works using the following HTTP methods:

• GET (Read): Gets a list of items, or a single item
• POST (Create): Creates an item
• PATCH (Update): Updates an item
• DELETE: Deletes an item

Creating new models

If you need to add more models to the project just create a new file in /app/models/ and it will be loaded dynamically.

Creating new routes

If you need to add more routes to the project just create a new file in /app/routes/ and it will be loaded dynamically.

Creating new controllers

When you create a new controller file, try to also create another file with validations. Ex. countries.js countries.validate.js An example of this is included in the repository.

Bugs or improvements

Feel free to report any bugs or improvements. Pull requests are always welcome.

I love this! How can I help?

It´s amazing you feel like that! Send me a tweet https://twitter.com/davellanedam , share this with others, make a pull request or if you feel really thankful you can always buy me a beer! Enjoy!

License

This project is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.