question-answer-rest-api

Question - Answer Rest Api - ExpressJs - MongoDB

Getting started

To get the Node server running locally:

Clone this repo
npm install to install all required dependencies
Create MongoDb Cluster and Get Connection MongoDb URI
Set environment variables in config.env under ./config/env
- Set MONGO_URI = <YOUR_MONGO_URI>
- Set JWT_SECRET_KEY = <YOUR_SECRET_KEY>
- Set SMTP_USER=<YOUR_GMAIL_EMAIL>
- Set SMTP_PASS=<YOUR_GMAIL_PASSWORD>
node dummy-generator.js --import to load dummy data to database
npm run dev to start the local server

Code Overview

Dependencies

bcryptjs : This module enables storing of passwords as hashed passwords instead of plaintext.
dotenv : Dotenv is a that loads environment variables from a .env file.
express : Web framework for Node.js.
express-async-handler : Middleware for handling exceptions inside of async express routes and passing them to your express error handlers.
jsonwebtoken : An implementation of JSON Web Tokens.
mongoose : For modeling and mapping MongoDB data to JavaScript
slugify : For encoding titles into a URL-friendly format
nodemailer : Send e-mails from Node.js
multer : Node.js middleware for uploading files

Application Structure

server.js - The entry point to our application. This file defines our express server and connects it to MongoDB using mongoose. It also inncludes the routes we'll be using in the application.
config/ - This folder contains configuration for central location environment variables and other configurations.
routes/ - This folder contains the route definitions (answer, question etc. ) for our API.
models/ - This folder contains the schema definitions for our Mongoose models (User, Question).
controllers/ - This folder contains controllers for our API.
public/ - This folder contains static files for our API.
middlewares/ - This folder contains middlewares for our API.
helpers/ - This folder contains helper functions for adapting 3rd party libraries for our API.
dummy/ - This folder contains dummy data created by dummy-generator.js file for our database.

Error Handling

In middlewares/errors/errorHandler.js, we define a error-handling middleware for handling Mongoose's errors and our own errors.

Authentication

Requests are authenticated using the Authorization header and value Bearer: {{token}}. with a valid JWT.

We define express middlewares in middlewares/authorization/auth.js that can be used to authenticate requests. The required middlewares returns 401 or 403.