/express-project-starter

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Express Project Start

My attempt at formulating an Express starter similar to my App Academy template

Backend Setup

Initialize Project and Repository

  1. npm init -y to initialize a new package
  2. git init to create a new Git repository
  3. touch .gitignore to add a .gitignore file
    1. Add node_modules into this file so we don't upload packages

Setup Database Connection

  1. touch .sequelizerc to create a new Sequelize configuration

    const path = require('path');

module.exports = {
   config: path.resolve('config', 'database.js'),
   'models-path': path.resolve('db', 'models'),
   'seeders-path': path.resolve('db', 'seeders'),
   'migrations-path': path.resolve('db', 'migrations'),
};

  2. touch .env to create a file for our environment variables

  3. Add .env to the .gitignore file so we don't upload our .env file to GitHub

  4. In Postgres:

    1. Create a new USER/ROLE to administrate your app:
      1. CREATE ROLE **username** WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD '**password**';
    2. Create a new DATABASE for your app and set the owner to be the ROLE you created previously:
      1. CREATE DATABASE **database** WITH OWNER **owner**;

Backend Packages

  1. express - Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js
  2. csurf - Node.js CSRF protection middleware. Requires either a session middleware or cookie-parser to be initialized first.
  3. cors - used to enable CORS with various options.
  4. express-html-sanitizer - Middleware for Express JS to cleanup/sanitize JSON request body in express RESTful Service or in any JSON input containing unwanted HTML tags.
  5. @faker-js/faker - Generate massive amounts of fake data
  6. Time Conversion Packages
    1. moment - A JavaScript date library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates.
      1. Larger than most other options
    2. Luxon - A powerful, modern, and friendly wrapper for JavaScript dates and times.
    3. Day.js - A lightweight alternative to moment
  7. dotenv - Loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env
  8. per-env - Allows you to do certain things in Node based on the environment settings. NODE_ENV defaults to development
  9. bcrypt - A package to help hash passwords
  10. cookie-parser - Parse Cookie header and populate req.cookies with an object keyed by the cookie names. Optionally you may enable signed cookie support by passing a secret string, which assigns req.secret so it may be used by other middleware.
  11. express-bearer-token - will attempt to extract a bearer token from a request from these locations:
    • The key access_token in the request body.
    • The key access_token in the request params.
    • The value from the header Authorization: Bearer .
    • (Optional) Get a token from cookies header with key access_token. If a token is found, it will be stored on req.token. If one has been provided in more than one location, this will abort the request immediately by sending code 400 (per RFC6750).
  12. express-html-sanitizer - cleanup/sanitize JSON request body in express RESTful Service or in any JSON input containing unwanted HTML tags.
  13. express-validator - A library of string validators and sanitizers.
  14. jsonwebtoken - Implementation of JSON Web Tokens
  15. morgan - HTTP request logger middleware for node.js
  16. pg - Non-blocking PostgreSQL client for Node.js. Pure JavaScript and optional native libpq bindings.
  17. sequelize - Promise-based Node.js ORM tool for Postgres
  18. sequelize-cli - Sequelize Command Line Interface (CLI)
  19. nodemon - Helps develop node.js based applications by automatically restarting the node application when file changes in the directory are detected.