HTML Reference API

An example of a REST API built with Express and MongoDB, for self-education. A lot of this was learned from the book Web Development with Node & Express by Ethan Brown, and the article Build a RESTful API Using Node and Express 4 by Chris Sevilleja.

This simply returns JSON; for the associated front-end client, check out html-reference-webapp. Currently it's used to store data on HTML elements (html, head, body, etc.) though the only data stored at the moment is a name and description for each element.

Setup

If you want to run this locally you'll need a MongoDB database. I used a free sandbox database hosted on mLab, but anything starting with mongodb:// should work fine, probably. The app expects there to be a credentials.js file in the base directory with MongoDB URLs, like this:

module.exports = {
    mongo: {
        development: {
            connectionString: "mongodb://<your-mongodb-instance>"
        },
        production: {
            connectionString: "mongodb://<your-mongodb-instance>"
        }
    }
};

Once you've added that, and assuming you already have Node installed, navigate to the base directory with a command line interface and do this:

npm install
gulp

That will start the API server, and the main html-reference-api.js file will also be watched for changes. When any changes are saved, the Mocha test suite will run to test those changes. The test suite can also be run manually (assuming the API server is already running) from the project root directory like so, if you have Mocha globally installed:

mocha tests

Supported Routes

Once the application is running, the following routes are available:

Route	Request Method	Action
/api/elements	GET	View all elements
/api/elements	POST	Add a new element
/api/element/:element_id	GET	View a specific element
/api/element/:element_id	PUT	Update a specific element
/api/element/:element_id	DELETE	Delete a specific element