Node Starter

Introduction

This is a starter template for creating a node server with express, graphql, zipkin, docker, and an AWS KMS integration. While it does come bundled with all these features, it also serves as a good example on how you can organize and develop any node server.

Whats inside

• Basic HTTP and HTTPS express server
• GraphQL schema definition and example implementation
• Logging configuration and example implementation
• Zipkin integration for trace information
• Dockerfile for building docker image
• docer-compose file for building and running a docker stack
• AWS KMS integration for decryption
• Unit test examples for routes, graphql queries, and REST calls.

Getting started

Installing

Run an npm install in the root of the project directory to get all of the dependencies.

npm install

Ok you're done installing things :)

Build

Run the following command to build the project.

npm run build:docker

Note: this will build a docker image called bearstar71685/node-starter.

Run

Run the following command to start up the server on http://localhost:4040 and https://localhost:4443

npm start:docker

Note: this will create and run a docker container from the image that was created after running npm run build.

Test

Run the following command to run the tests.

npm test

This should run all our tests and should display the results in the terminal.

Dev

Run the following command to run the service locally ( NOT on a docker image )

npm start

This will simply start up the node application.

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Configuration

Introduction

This application can be configured through configuration files under the config/env directory. For example, if you would like the application to log debug logs in production, you would modify the prod configuration with log: 'debug'

Log

Details:

This application is configured to use a logger for logging out all information ( debug, info, error, etc ).

Parameters:

log.console: a winston configuration object. See Winston documentation for additional details.

Example Env Config

log: {
  console: {
    level: "debug",
    timestamp: true,
    json: true,
  }
},

Zipkin

Details:

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that allows you to track the flow of actions throughout a microservice architecture. This app has been configured to add trace information to each log message and optionally send trace data to a zipkin server.

Parameters:

zipkin.recorder: one of three options none, console, or batch. none will configure zipkin to do nothing extra, console will add log out zipkin details using the logger, and batch will configure zipkin to send zipkin details to a server

zipkin.logger.endpoint: url to a zipkin server. Note, this is only used if recorder is set to batch.

Example Env Config

zipkin: {
  logger: {
    endpoint: 'http://zipkin:9411/api/v1/spans',
  },
  recorder: 'none'
}

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Docker Compose

Disclaimer:

This is temporary stuff ( so you can play with this example and zipkn ). You should actually have a compose file for your entire system that will run everything that you need.

Motivation

To build and start up multiple docker containers. Currently, this compose file will build the node-starter container and a zipkin container. This will allow you to test the node-starter alongside an instance of zipkin to see trace information.

Build & Start

Build

This compose file uses two images, bearstar71685/node-starter and openzipkin/zipkin. In order to run the compose file, you must first make sure you have the images locally on your machine. If you simply follow the instructions below, docker will attempt to start up the services. When docker does this, it will first look to see if you have the images installed on your machine. If docker finds the images, it will create and start the docker containers. If docker does not find them locally, it will attempt to install them from dockers hub. So, this means that the first time you run this command it will be slow, as its downloading stuff.

Start

Run the following command to start the website-api image and a zipkin server image.

npm run start:compose

All the npm script above is doing is running docker-compose up. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you make any changes to the code you will need to rebuild the docker image locally. To do this simply follow the build instructions from the Getting Started section above. This will rebuild the bearstar71685/node-starter image. Once you have done this simply re-run npm run start:compose or docker-compose up and it will restart the node server!