Node.js RESTful API

A RESTful API built with Node.js, Babel and MongoDB

This is an improvement over the previous RESTful API I had. The main change is the use of NPM tasks instead of Gulp to compile, run, test, lint, etc. I found that babel and gulp together are extremely slow for development, any file changes triggered the gulp build which took around 15 seconds (even when managing dependencies with npm3). Now with the use of babel-watch builds are much faster (1 second or 2).

Installation and running

1. Clone the repository
2. Install dependencies npm install
3. Start MongoDB server: the project comes with a script in scripts/mongostart.sh that will pull a MongoDB image from Docker and start it listening in port 27018. It can also be any other MongoDB server running anywhere. Just make sure you change the connection details in config/env/local.js.
4. Run the API server with NODE_ENV=local npm start
5. Try the API calling the http://localhost:3000/api/health-check endpoint.

As a Docker Container

1. Clone the repository
2. Run docker-compose up --build
3. Once the containers is built and the images are running you can reach the API on localhost:3000

For production

1. Run npm run compile. This will generate the dist directory with all the code transpiled from ES6 to ES5.
2. Run the transpiled dist/index.js with node or any other process manager like pm2.

Unit Testing and Code Coverage

All tests are in server/tests and can be run with npm test.

To run the tests and generate coverage report with istanbul run npm run coverage.

API Docs

To generate the API documentation simply run npm run docs. This will create the docs directory with all the documentation generated through the apidoc module.

Linting

There's an npm task for linting as well, this is useful to check before pushing any code. To run the linting task execute npm run lint. ESLint configuration can be changed in .eslintrc.