Node Express Template (NET.ts)

The Node Express Template (NET.ts) is a small template project which help you to speed up the process of building RESTful API.

Inside of this repoistory you will find fully configured and ready to use express based web application for Node.js runtime. It’s built on TypeScript and follows the best top-ranked content on Node.js best practices from https://github.com/goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices repository.

Main features:

• 🐳 Containerized application
• 🚄 ExpressJS framework with TypeScript on the board
• ♻️ Live reload
• 🏇 minified and optimized code for production build
• ✏️ Linting via ESLint with Airbnb configuration
• 🚑 Code Formatter with Prettier
• 📘 VSCode configuration: Debug, Settings, Tasks and extension for ESLint, Prettier, TypeScript
• 🚧 Jest for unit testing
• 🏄 And many more...

Additional features:

The master branch contains the core version of NET.ts. However, if you need additional module (such as mongoDB for instacne), you can switch to any of the following dedicated branches. Keep in mind that the feature branches are regularly updated with changes made to the core version on the master branch.

• 🌐 Mongo database - See version with MongoDB
• 🔒 mTLS - See version with mTLS

Getting started

Install Docker and Docker Compose which are used to maximise the convenience of development on local machine.

When both are installed, build the NET.ts image as follow:

docker-compose build

Run the app:

docker-compose up

Go to:

 http://localhost:8080/api/health

If you see the following response in the browser:

{"status":"OK","data":"2022-02-13T20:05:13.965Z"}

It means that everything work as expected. You may start to develop your business logic. Please scroll down to "How to work with NET.ts" section.

Getting started, standard way (no containerization)

If you want to run NET.ts "standard way" using the npm instead of docker-compose. You are free to do it just keep in mind that I develop the NET.ts project on node version 16. Note: you need to set env variables defined in .env.local file. On mac OS you can use export $(cat .env.local) to export all env variables from the .env.local file.

Install dependencies:

npm install

Run server in dev mode:

npm run server:dev

How to work with NET.ts

There are few rules that you have to obey to enjoy NET.ts fully.

1. Enviromment variables - define your envs in .env.local file and provide validation rules for them inside @config/config.ts file.
2. Structure your solution by components. There is an example user CRUD component that shows how you may build logic for your own componnents.
3. Define your routung inside api.ts fiile.
4. Describe your newly created API inside swagger.json file

Testing

The Jest test suites are run by executing

npm test

To run tests directly insiide of the NET.ts container:

docker-compose run web npm run test

Code linting

Run code quality analysis using

npm run lint

or insde of the container

docker-compose run web npm run lint

Fixing problems

Automatically fix linter's problems

npm run lint:fix

or insde of the container

docker-compose run web npm run lint:fix

Logging

import logger from '@core/utils/logger';

logger.error('message'); // level 0
logger.warn('message'); // level 1
logger.info('message'); // level 2
logger.http('message'); // level 3
logger.verbose('message'); // level 4
logger.debug('message'); // level 5
logger.silly('message'); // level 6

In development mode, log messages of all severity levels will be printed to the console. In production mode, only info, warn, and error logs will be printed to the console.

Note: API request information (request url, response code, timestamp, etc.) are also automatically logged (using morgan).

Switching log-level on runtime

If you use docker to run the app, please connect to node-express-template_web* container and simply execute npm run loglevel:change in new terminal. It will increase your current log level, in case you reach the highest level it will back to error level which is 0. This feature may be useful on production env when you want to switch your app log level to debug without restarting node server.

Troubleshooting

To help you diagnose problems, a Unique Request ID is added to each incoming request and printed to a log. This allows you to correlate log entries for a given web request across multiple log data sources.

Here are some examples of log entries for a Create User request (/api/user):

web_1  | 2022-12-18 09:56:51 8e06413b-1cbb-41d4-baf3-01ee12b94602 info START Request Id: 8e06413b-1cbb-41d4-baf3-01ee12b94602
web_1  | 2022-12-18 09:56:51 8e06413b-1cbb-41d4-baf3-01ee12b94602 debug User created: { name: 'John Doe', email: 'john.d@example.net' }
web_1  | 2022-12-18 09:56:51 8e06413b-1cbb-41d4-baf3-01ee12b94602 info POST /api/user 201 - 145.525 ms
web_1  | 2022-12-18 09:56:51 8e06413b-1cbb-41d4-baf3-01ee12b94602 info END Request Id: 8e06413b-1cbb-41d4-baf3-01ee12b94602

SwaggerUI

An interactive API documentation of NET.ts can be accessed at the path: /api-docs
For local development use this: http://localhost:8080/api-docs
If your webservice's basePath is different from "/" put basePath after api-docs in url address e.g.
for service placed under <basePath> subfolder the correct URL is: https://<baseURL>/<basePath>/api-docs/<basePath>
Remember to select correct protocol befor you try to call any endpoint, "http" is used only for local development.
Important: swaggerUI is disabled for the production env

Running in production with Docker

For the sake of readability, you may build an image with custom name i.e. net.ts, go to the root project (where the Dockerfile is) and execute:

docker build -t net.ts .

When done, execute the docker run command to create a container from a net.ts image and starts the container with all the required environment variables:

docker run --rm -it -e NODE_ENV='production' -e API_KEY_TOKEN='token' -p 8080:8080 net.ts

That's it, you just ran the app in production mode.

Contributing

All contributions are welcome!

🙌 Thanks