Redinking Blog Utiva Project | BACKEND

This is the backend of the capstone blog project at Utiva for Binance Charity Tech Scholarship. The project consists of building a blog website using the MERN stack. This documents contains the details of how the backend is built making use of NodeJS, Express, mongoDB and other packages.

Table of Contents

1. Intro
2. Initialization
3. Full List of Dependencies Used
4. Connecting to Database
5. Handling Errors

Initialization

The project begins by first initializing the folder with package.json file using npm init -y. After this, the dependencies/packages needed for the app are installed (see full list of dependencies) using the npm command:

// terminal
npm install <package-name>

Express Server

Next is creating an instance of express app and setting up the express server on a port number

// index.js - entry point
const express = require('express')
const app = express()
const port = process.env.PORT || 9000 // I like to use 9000 because of my postman setup
app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`server is listening on port ${port}...`)
})

Connecting to Database

The database used is mongoDB - a popular NoSQL database that forms the M of the MERN stack. First generate a connection string from mongoDB atlas and store that in .env file

MONGO_URI=your_connection_string

Then use the connection string to connect app to mongoDB atlas

// connectDB.js
const mongoose = require('mongoose')

const connectDB = (uri) => {
  return mongoose.connect(uri)
}

Then create a start function to connect the app to database and also start express server

// index.js
const connectDB = require('./connectDB')

const start = async () => {
  try {
    await connectDB(process.env.MONGO_URI)
    app.listen(port, console.log(`server is listening on port ${port}...`))
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(error)
  }
}

Handling Errors

Errors are handled using express-async-errors - a popular npm package freely available in the npm registry

Full List of Dependencies Used

Syntax	Description
express	nodejs framework for create a server for you app
nodemon	installed only as a dev dependency, it help to watch our code and updates the server anytime we save changes