nodejs application pattern

nodejs-application-pattern.md

Description

Build an API with NodeJS with a great, small framework.

This is the NodeJS application pattern.

Quickstart

1. Install dependencies using npm install

2. Start the API server using node server.js

   node server.js
   API listening on port 9999
   

3. Send an HTTP request to the API server using cURL

   curl -X GET "http://localhost:9999" -v
   * Rebuilt URL to: http://localhost:9999/
   *   Trying 127.0.0.1...
   * Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 9999 (#0)
   > GET / HTTP/1.1
   > Host: localhost:9999
   > User-Agent: curl/7.43.0
   > Accept: */*
   >
   < HTTP/1.1 200 OK
   < X-Powered-By: Express
   < x-api-version: 0
   < Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2016 03:19:17 GMT
   < Connection: keep-alive
   < Content-Length: 0
   <
   * Connection #0 to host localhost left intact
   

Pre-requisites

• Docker for mac (although it should work on any docker installation)

Framework

The idea behind of this the popular MVC, implemented as router-controller-service chains:

• models using Promises to contain logic as services (in services/)
• controllers using Promises to contain chains of service methods (in controllers/)
• views as HTTP endpoints using routers (in routers/)

See Wikipedia on MVC

File structure

├── config                         // Configuration files live here as JSON objects. 
│   └── config.json
├── controllers                    // Control application flow with methods that return Promises
│   ├── application.controller.js
│   └── index.js
├── node_modules
├── package.json
├── routers                        // HTTP endpoints exposed as ExpressJS router objects
│   ├── application.router.js
│   └── index.js
├── server.js                      // Entrypoint to the web server. Everything is included and injected here.
├── services                       // Control application logic with methods that return Promises
│   ├── application.service.js
│   └── index.js
└── to-do.md                       // Things I still have left to do

Tools

• Expressjs as a webserver
• Sinon & Mocha for testing
• A way to get configurations

How to

Persist a record to a database as a model