📜 Quotes API

A production-grade REST API that serves random quotes from famous Indian scholars and scientists — built with Node.js, Express, and SQLite. Designed to be deployable anywhere in minutes with zero external dependencies.

---

🌟 Project Overview

The Quotes API is a stateless, scalable HTTP service that exposes a curated dataset of 25+ quotes from luminaries such as A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, C.V. Raman, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and more. The architecture is deliberately simple — one file-based SQLite database, no background processes — making it trivial to run locally or deploy on a PaaS like Render.

---

✨ Features

Feature	Detail
Random quote endpoint	Scalable offset-based selection (no ORDER BY RANDOM())
Health check	/api/v1/health — uptime + timestamp
Rate limiting	60 req / min / IP via express-rate-limit
Security headers	helmet + cors
Structured logging	pino with pretty-print in dev, JSON in prod
Graceful shutdown	SIGTERM / SIGINT handling with connection cleanup
Redis-ready	Drop-in store swap when you need distributed rate limiting
Zero external DB	SQLite file — no Postgres, no MongoDB, no setup

---

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Runtime — Node.js 18+ LTS
• Framework — Express.js 4
• Database — SQLite via better-sqlite3
• Logging — pino + pino-pretty
• Security — helmet, cors
• Rate limiting — express-rate-limit
• Config — dotenv

---

🚀 Local Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18 or newer (node -v)
• npm 9 or newer (npm -v)

1 — Clone & install

git clone https://github.com/your-username/quotes-api.git
cd quotes-api
npm install

2 — Configure environment

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env if you want to change PORT or DB_PATH

3 — Seed the database

npm run seed

You should see:

✅  Seed complete — 25 new row(s) inserted. Total in DB: 25

4 — Start the server

# Development (with pretty logs + auto-restart via nodemon)
npm run dev

# Production
npm start

The server will be live at http://localhost:3000.

---

📡 API Endpoints

GET /api/v1/quote

Returns a single random quote.

Response 200 OK:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "quote": {
      "id": 4,
      "quote": "Dream is not that which you see while sleeping; it is something that does not let you sleep.",
      "author": "A.P.J. Abdul Kalam"
    }
  }
}

---

GET /api/v1/health

Health check — used by load balancers and uptime monitors.

Response 200 OK:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "status": "ok",
    "uptime": 42.317,
    "timestamp": "2024-06-01T10:00:00.000Z",
    "service": "quotes-api"
  }
}

---

Error responses

All errors follow the same shape:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Route GET /api/v1/does-not-exist not found."
}

Status	Scenario
404	Route or resource not found
429	Rate limit exceeded
500	Internal server error

---

🧪 Example Requests (curl)

# Random quote
curl http://localhost:3000/api/v1/quote

# Health check
curl http://localhost:3000/api/v1/health

# With pretty JSON output (requires jq)
curl -s http://localhost:3000/api/v1/quote | jq .

# Check rate-limit headers
curl -I http://localhost:3000/api/v1/quote

---

☁️ Deployment on Render

Render is a great free-tier PaaS for Node.js APIs. Here's how to deploy:

Step 1 — Push to GitHub

git init
git add .
git commit -m "feat: initial production API"
git remote add origin https://github.com/your-username/quotes-api.git
git push -u origin main

Step 2 — Create a Render Web Service

1. Log in at render.com and click New → Web Service
2. Connect your GitHub repo
3. Fill in the settings:

Field	Value
Name	quotes-api
Region	Choose closest to your users
Branch	main
Runtime	Node
Build Command	npm install && npm run seed
Start Command	npm start
Instance Type	Free (or Starter for always-on)

Step 3 — Add Environment Variables

In Environment → Add Environment Variable:

Key	Value
NODE_ENV	production
PORT	10000 (Render sets this automatically)
DB_PATH	./database/quotes.db

⚠️ Persistent disk note: Render's free tier has an ephemeral filesystem — the DB resets on each deploy. To persist data across deploys, attach a Render Disk (paid) mounted at /var/data and set DB_PATH=/var/data/quotes.db. The seed script is idempotent and safe to re-run.

Step 4 — Deploy

Click Create Web Service. Render will build, seed, and start your API. You'll get a public URL like:

https://quotes-api-xxxx.onrender.com/api/v1/quote

Step 5 — Verify

curl https://quotes-api-xxxx.onrender.com/api/v1/health

---

🏗️ Project Structure

quotes-api/
├── src/
│   ├── app.js              # Express app factory (middlewares + routes)
│   ├── server.js           # HTTP server + graceful shutdown
│   ├── config/
│   │   ├── env.js          # Centralised env var access
│   │   ├── database.js     # SQLite singleton connection
│   │   └── logger.js       # Pino logger instance
│   ├── controllers/
│   │   └── quoteController.js
│   ├── routes/
│   │   └── quoteRoutes.js
│   ├── services/
│   │   └── quoteService.js # Business logic + scalable random query
│   ├── middleware/
│   │   ├── rateLimiter.js
│   │   ├── errorHandler.js
│   │   └── requestLogger.js
│   └── utils/
│       └── response.js     # sendSuccess / sendError helpers
├── database/
│   ├── init.sql            # Raw schema (informational)
│   └── seed.js             # Idempotent seed script
├── .env.example
├── package.json
└── README.md

---

🔌 Redis (Optional — Future Scaling)

The rate limiter uses an in-memory store by default. When you need distributed rate limiting across multiple instances, swap the store in src/middleware/rateLimiter.js:

const RedisStore = require('rate-limit-redis');
const { createClient } = require('redis');

const redisClient = createClient({ url: env.REDIS_URL });
await redisClient.connect();

const rateLimiter = rateLimit({
  // ... existing config ...
  store: new RedisStore({ sendCommand: (...args) => redisClient.sendCommand(args) }),
});

Set REDIS_URL in your .env and install the packages:

npm install rate-limit-redis redis

No other changes required — the rest of the codebase remains stateless.

---

📄 License

MIT