expressjs-api

An API base for ExpressJS. Fork, or clone to use this as a base for a project.

The Basics

An API base for ExpressJS. This is intended as a base for ExpressJS based APIs.

Code Seperation

This project has different .js files for every route, middleware, so on. The app.js file simply searches, and runs other JS files. This makes it really easy to

Environment Variables

The project is setup with a pre-configured .env file. I would highly recommend to put the majority of your variables as environment variables, instead of having a config.json file, or some alternative. Environment variables are far easier to manage, and integrate into things like Docker.

File Structure

api/

api/routes/

This contains the routes of your project. Each route is in a seperate file to split up a huge app.js file, into many smaller files.

api/middleware/

Identical to routes, but handles middleware insead.

data/

Intented to store data that wouldn't really fit in a database.

data/translations/

Translations contains a list of all translation files.
As an example, two translation files are provided. translations.json is the default English one. By default, it also comes with translations.de.json, a German variant of translations.

You can create as many translation files as you want. When creating a new translations file, you must modify app.js to include it. To do this, we simply have to add a new line to app.js below let translations = {}

let translations = {}
translations['en'] = require('./data/translations/translations.json') // English
translations['<lang>'] = require('./data/translations/translations.<lang>.json') // Replace <lang> with the two character language name

Creating Routes & Middleware

Very first, we must find the apropriate directory to place the .js files that handle middleware and routes.
For routes:api/routes/<file>.js
For middleware:/api/middleware/<file>.js

Creating the .js file

Clone the existing file in your desired directory. For routes, it will be named getInfo.js, for middleware, it's named log.js.

Documentation

It's recommended you use the pre-existing comments, located at the top of the file, to document what this file does. While this is recommended to modify this, it's by no means neccassary.

Changing the Route/Middlewares Function

To modify what the route/middlware does, modify the code between app.use. In log.js, you would want to modify the following:

// Put your middleware code here
// Build the log
let date = new Date
let DATE_STRING = `${date.toISOString()}`

// Create log var, and log to console
let log = `[${DATE_STRING}] ${req.method} ${req.hostname}${req.originalUrl} | ${req.header('user-agent')}`.grey
console.log(log)

next() // Otherwise the middleware won't continue forwards

Starting the Server

To start the server, simply run the app.js file using node.

node app.js

Environment Variables

If you don't use .env to pass environment variables, you can also do it here.

API_PORT=4050 NODE_ENV="staging" LOG_LEVEL=1 node app.js