Chapter 3 - Persisting Data

[clairefro]

To prevent losing all of our restaurants every time our server restarts, and to allow our API to scale to be used by multiple clients at once, we need to add a real database.

For this example, we added MongoDB. However, you can use any type of database you want (PostgreSQL, MySQL etc).

IMPORTANT - handling secrets
When dealing with databases, we almost always have secrets we don't want to share with the public that give access to our data. To hide secrets, such as the database connection URI, you will need to make a local file at your project root called .env. This file is explicitly ignored from git tracking because we added it to the .gitignore file. That means the contents of the .env file will not show up anywhere you publish your code, like GitHub. Secret's safe!

The variables defined in your .env will be local only to your computer. When you go to deploy your API to the public internet, your hosting service will let you define your environment variables secretly and securely from their dashboard.