This is a basic API REST skeleton written on JavaScript using async/await. Great for building a starter web API for your front-end (Android, iOS, 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.
Hi! I'm Daniel Avellaneda, I'm an open source enthusiast and devote my free time to building projects in this field.
I'm the creator and maintainer of node-express-mongodb-jwt-rest-api-skeleton and vue-skeleton-mvp
These projects are a "starter web app kit" for any developer who wants to build their own app without starting from scratch: API + Frontend
Both projects have been downloaded thousands of times by web developers around the world.
I'm doing my best to provide you a good experience when using my apps, so if you like what I'm doing and wish to say "thanks!", please buy me a coffee ☕
Feel free to send me a tweet https://twitter.com/davellanedam, share this with others or make a pull request
- 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.
- i18n ready (for sending emails in multiple languages).
- 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.
- Ability to refresh token
- JWT Tokens, 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.
- Node.js 10+
- MongoDB 3.6+
- Redis 5.0+
A demo of this API is located at: https://api-demo.daniel-avellaneda.com
email: admin@admin.com
password: 12345
IMPORTANT: Database resets every 30 mins like "12:00am, 12:30am, 1:00am" and so on. So anything you do with the API will be lost after a short time.
API documentation
Postman API example collection
If you want to test it don´t forget to change the server variable to:
https://api-demo.daniel-avellaneda.com
Demo is also linked to a VueJS project that shows how this API can be integrated to a frontend that is able to consume an API.
Repo is here: https://github.com/davellanedam/vue-skeleton-mvp
Running demo is here: https://vue-demo.daniel-avellaneda.com
- Clone the project from github. Change "myproject" to your project name.
git clone https://github.com/davellanedam/node-express-mongodb-jwt-rest-api-skeleton.git ./myproject
- Download repository
- Uncompress to your desired directory
cd myproject
npm install
npm update
- 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
IMPORTANT: By default token expires in 3 days (4320 minutes set in .env.example). You can refresh token at endpoint GET /token. If everything it´s ok you will get a new token.
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.
Language is automatically detected from Accept-Language
header on the request. So either you send locale manually on the request or your browser will send its default, if Accept-Language
header is not sent then it will use en
locale as default.
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.
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
****************************
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
Format your code with prettier by typing:
npm run format
Format all your markdown files with remark by typing:
npm run remark
Lint your code with ESLint by typing:
npm run lint
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
.
https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/487539/RWaHwoLV
You can import the example collection to Postman. To import, click the import button located and select postman-example.json
located within the root directory.
Go to manage environments
to create environments for development, production, etc. On each of the environments you create you will need to:
-
Create a new key
authToken
and within the/login
request this value is automatically updated after a successfull login through a script located in thetests
tab. Each time you make a request to the API it will sendAuthorization
header with thetoken
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
If you need to add more models to the project just create a new file in /app/models/
and it will be loaded dynamically.
If you need to add more routes to the project just create a new file in /app/routes/
and it will be loaded dynamically.
When you create a new controller, try to also create another folder with validations and helpers. Ex. /countries
, /countries/validators
and /countries/helpers
. An example of this is included in the repository.
Feel free to report any bugs or improvements. Pull requests are always welcome.
This project is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.