Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

By : Valentin Bojinov
Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

By: Valentin Bojinov

Overview of this book

When building RESTful services, it is really important to choose the right framework. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice for building RESTful APIs. This third edition of RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 will teach you to create scalable and rich RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. You will be introduced to the latest NPM package handler and understand how to use it to customize your RESTful development process. You will begin by understanding the key principle that makes an HTTP application a RESTful-enabled application. After writing a simple HTTP request handler, you will create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects; explore using the NoSQL database, MongoDB, to store data; and get to grips with using self-descriptive URLs. You’ll learn to set accurate HTTP status codes along with understanding how to keep your applications backward-compatible. Also, while implementing a full-fledged RESTful service, you will use Swagger to document the API and implement automation tests for a REST-enabled endpoint with Mocha. Lastly, you will explore some authentication techniques to secure your application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Installing the Express framework and other modules


Now that we have npm installed, let's make use of it and install some of the modules we will be using heavily throughout this book. The most important among them is the Express framework (http://www.expressjs.com/). It is a flexible web application framework for Node.js, providing a robust RESTful API for developing single or multi-page web applications. The following command will download the Express module from the npm repository and make it available for our local Node.js installation:

npm install -g express

You will find the express module among the results of an npm ls after a successful installation. Later in this chapter, we will learn how to write unit tests for our Node.js modules. We will need the nodeunit module for that purpose:

npm install nodeunit -g

The -g option will install nodeunit globally. This means that the module will be stored at a central place on your filesystem; usually, that is either /usr/lib/node_modules  or /usr...