Rocket Insights Node Express.js Boilerplate

Intended to get you started fast on an Express REST API with no frontend.

This boilerplate is a work in progress as of January 2019 and still needs feedback from Rocketeers

There are a lot of great ExpressJS boilerplates out there, why did you create this one?

We need to develop one universal boilerplate that covers everyone's use cases.... Just kidding...

At Rocket Insights one of our mottos is "Strong opinions, loosely held." We wanted to codify some of the expertise we have in server-side node.js development here and use it as a way to get started faster on projects.

Second, many boilerplates bundle together front end and backend technologies. This one's goal is for a simple HTTP REST API with no front end included.

Third, we found many existing boilerplates target a particular technology and/or architectural pattern. This boilerplate tries to toe the line between useful and getting out of the way fast. Think "Hello world with good logging and sensible defaults."

Goals

The goals for this boilerplate are to:

• Take care of the boring stuff around setting up a node REST API in Node.js and ExpressJS
• KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
• Keep the frontend separate (REST API only)
• Avoid dictating architectural patterns, persistence options, or implementation style/details.
• Get an somewhat-production-ready API up and running with a git clone and replacement of minimal code. (With the full realization that production ready code will need a lot more work and TLC)
• Create a simple base for different "flavors" of this boilerplate for different datastores/frameworks.

Features

• Simple file/folder structure/layout:
  • routes - Express route configurations
  • controllers - Express controllers to handle requests/responses
  • services - Business logic modules. This could be renamed to something else or removed entirely.
  • server.js - Core setup of Express
  • db - Database setup placeholder, choose your own flavor. See branches of repo for different types of datasource setup examples.
• Common Express middleware already enabled (CORS, bodyparser, etc)
• Environment variable configuration with dotenv-safe.
  • See the .env file for configurable options and to add new ones.
• Logging setup with Winston
• Simple unit and integration test setup with Mocha, Chai, and Supertest
• Easily extendable for your favorite data persistence techology. Some examples already exist:
  • postgres and sequelize
  • MongoDB and Mongoose
  • See branches named flavors
• Dockerized - Simple Dockerfile setup with developer ready docker-compose file

Once you get the project setup, look for the FIXME's in the codebase for areas to replace/extend.

Future Feature Ideas

• - Authentication/Authorization (passportJS)
• - Rate limiting

To get started with Development with Docker

This is a full fledged development environment which can be extended with a database or other data store running alongside it in a container as well. It will pickup any local changes you make except for dependency updates.

Make sure you have Docker for Mac and Docker Compose installed.

From the project's directory run:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.local.yml up

This will use a base Docker Compose file meant to run in Production and extends it with some handy things for development.

To get into a shell while running the app in docker, run:

docker-compose exec api /bin/bash

To rebuild when dependencies are added

Run

docker-compose build

Then run the same up command as above.

To get started locally (without Docker)

If you'd rather just develop locally and install databases there, etc, you can do the following: Run: npm install or yarn install

Then: npm run dev - This will start the app up using nodemon which will hot reload the app if it detects code changes.

Testing The App

You can test the app by running:

curl localhost:8009/replaceme

Also, a sample Postman collection can be imported (in the docs folder).

Automated Tests

You can run the unit test suite with no database up and running by running: npm run test:unit

Note that the database branches also have end to end integration tests configured.