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.
- Cache ready (Redis)
- 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 valueBasic username:password
whereusername:password
MUST BE ENCODED withBase64
. - Make requests with a token after login with
Authorization
header with valueBearer yourToken
whereyourToken
is the signed and encrypted token given in the response from the login process.
Requirements
- Node.js 8+
- MongoDB 3.6+
- Redis 5.0+
How to install
Using Git (recommended)
- 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
- Download repository
- 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)
- In the root this repository you will find a file named
.env.example
- Create a new file by copying and pasting the file and then renaming it to just
.env
- The file
.env
is already ignored, so you never commit your credentials. - Change the values of the file to your environment (development or production)
- Upload the
.env
to your environment server(development or production) - 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
cleans and then seeds the database with dynamic data.clean
cleans the database.seed
seeds the database with dynamic data.
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 admin@admin.com/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:
- Create a new key
authToken
withtoken
value (the token you got from the login process), each time you make a request to the API it will sendAuthorization
header with the token value in the request, you can check this on the headers of users or cities endpoints in the Postman example. - 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.