NodeJS Express note taking API

A backend, REST API for a note taking app built with NodeJS, Express and Typescript with multiple storage options. In this repo data can be saved to both localStorage and AWS DynamoDB.

This repo is part of an overall solution to move my site at www.mydaytodo.com from shared hosting to AWS and my iOS app from being a native iOS app to a web app deployed on AWS.

Current deployment of this nodejs app on AWS

This repo is the backend for the frontend in the repo.

Repo features ...

This repo has the following features

a REST API to save the following to DynamoDB
- Notes
- Todo
- Users
- Orders (... to be added soon)
endpoints to return weather data and jokes
it uses Express, NodeJS library with Typescript
postman collection for testing endpoints
yarn package manager
test coverage using JEST
nodemon for running the API during development

Libraries used

Library	Library homepage
NodeJS with Express	https://expressjs.com/
Typescript	https://www.typescriptlang.org/
Node-LocalStorage	https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-localstorage
AWS DynamoDB	https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
Postman	https://www.postman.com/
yarn	https://yarnpkg.com/
Nodemon	https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodemon

Installation and setup

git clone git@github.com:cptdanko/nodetypescriptcrudnotes.git
cd nodetypescriptcrudnotes/
yarn install

Run in dev mode

Running in dev mode means, all your changes to the source file will be immediately available. To start in dev mode, use

yarn devStart

Wait to see the message Started listening on 3000 (or whatever other default port you've set)

Run in production

To run in production, means to test how the app will run after you deploy it on a server e.g. AWS Elastic Beanstalk. To test this, you must first build the app, following by starting it i.e. use the following commands

yarn build
yarn start

How to get weather and news

For the endpoints to fetch news and weather to work, create a .env file in the root directory of this repo and add the variables

OPEN_WEATHER_MAP_KEY=your-openweather-map-api-key
NEWS_CATCHER_KEY=your-newscatcher-map-api-key

Storage options demonstrated in thie repo

LocalStorage

The default storage setting in this repo and if you have worked with localStorage on client-side Javascript then you know exactly how to work with this. How this works in NodeJS is that it will create a folder with the name specified, which as you can see on line 16 of this repo is notes. In that folder it will create a plain text file of the same name wher it will store the data you save.

AWS DynamoDB

If you have worked with NoSQL databases like MongoDB before, then this is Amazon's answer to that. The only thing is that it may take you some time to get famaliar with this. For me, it took me an entire day and an hour the next day to fully integrate CRUD operations for this repo. One way to ensure, this backend works with your AWS account is by adding the following environment variables

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-access-key-id
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-secret-key

Have a look at the AWS docs for more on this. You may also want to change the AWS region on line 17 to the region of your AWS account

NOTE Right now, for save functionality, while saving a note, this API will try to save to both localStorage as well as AWS.

Any help?

If you have difficulty understanding anything about this repo, feel free to reach out to me through this Github account or at bhuman at mydaytodoDOTcom or bhumanDOTsoniATgmailDOTcom.

Tutorials

The following tutorials came to be while working on this repo, AWS DynamoDB how to, AWS DynamoDB query by non-primary and you can find more at https://www.mydaytodo.com/blog/

cptdanko/node_typescript_crud_notes