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.