Node Express Modular Architecture

A boilerplate/starter project for quickly building RESTful APIs using Node.js, Express, and sequelize.

It incorporates the latest technologies, such as pnpm for package management, jest for test cases, and eslint for enforcing coding guidelines and best practices.

By running a single command, you will get a production-ready Node.js app installed and fully configured on your machine. The app comes with many built-in features, such as authentication using JWT, request validation, unit and integration tests, continuous integration, docker support, API documentation, pagination, etc. For more details, check the features list below.

Deployment and Production Readiness

This repository is designed to be easily deployed to production environments using Docker. The following steps are performed automatically by the Docker actions configured in this repository:

• Building Docker Image: The Docker action builds a Docker image for this application using the provided Dockerfile.
• Running Unit Tests: Before the Docker image is built and pushed, the Docker action runs the unit tests to ensure the codebase is functioning as expected.
• Pushing Docker Image: Once the unit tests pass, the Docker image is pushed to a container registry, making it ready for deployment.
• Production Ready: With the Docker image available in the container registry, this repository is production-ready, and the image can be deployed to production environments at any time.

By leveraging Docker and the automated workflows defined in this repository, you can ensure consistent and reliable deployments of this application, along with the confidence of passing unit tests before moving to production.

Prerequisites

Before deploying this application using Docker, make sure you have the following prerequisites installed:

• Docker: Installation Guide
• Container Registry Credentials: Ensure you have the necessary credentials to push Docker images to your container registry.

Deployment Steps

To deploy this application to a production environment using Docker, follow these steps:

1. Clone this repository: git clone <repository-url>
2. Navigate to the repository's root directory: cd <repository-folder>
3. Build the Docker image: docker build -t <image-name> .
4. Push the Docker image to your container registry: docker push <image-name>
5. Deploy the Docker image to your production environment using the container registry and deployment tooling of your choice.

Make sure to replace <repository-url>, <repository-folder>, and <image-name> with the appropriate values for your setup.

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

This repository is equipped with continuous integration and delivery capabilities using Docker actions. With every code change and pull request, the defined workflows will automatically run the unit tests and perform the necessary steps for building and pushing the Docker image. This ensures that the application is always production-ready and provides a streamlined process for deploying updates.

To configure or customize the CI/CD workflows, refer to the .github/workflows directory in this repository and modify the workflow files according to your requirements.

Manual Installation

If you would still prefer to do the installation manually, follow these steps:

Clone the repo:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sujeet-agrahari/node-express-modular-architecture.git
cd node-express-modular-architecture
npx rimraf ./.git

Install the dependencies:

pnpm install

Set the environment variables:

# open .env and modify the environment variables (if needed)

Table of Contents

• Node Express Modular Architecture
  • Deployment and Production Readiness
    • Prerequisites
    • Deployment Steps
    • Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)
  • Manual Installation
  • Table of Contents
  • Features
  • Commands
  • Environment Variables
  • Project Structure
  • CLI Support
  • API Documentation
    • API Endpoints
  • Error Handling
  • Validation
  • Authentication
  • Authorization
  • Logging
  • Linting
  • Contributing
  • Inspirations
  • License

Features

• Postgresql: Sequelize
• Authentication and authorization: using jsonwebtoken
• Validation: request data validation using Joi
• Logging: using winston
• Testing: unit and integration tests using ava
• Error handling: centralized error handling mechanism express-async-errors
• API documentation: with swagger-jsdoc and swagger-ui-express
• Process management: advanced production process management using PM2
• Dependency management: with npm
• Environment variables: using dotenv and node-config
• CORS: Cross-Origin Resource-Sharing enabled using cors
• Graceful Shutdown: with stoppable releases database connection and other resource before closing the server also listens for signals like SIGINT and SIGTERM

Commands

Running locally:

pnpm start 

Running in production:

# set NODE_ENV=production in .env 
pnpm start 

Docker:

# development
docker build ---target dev -t sujeet-agrahari/your-project:latest 

#production
docker build --target prod -t sujeet-agrahari/your-project:latest  

Linting:

# run ESLint
pnpm run lint

# fix ESLint errors
pnpm run lint:fix

Environment Variables

The environment variables can be found and modified in the .env file. They come with these default values:

# Port number
PORT=3000

# Set environment
NODE_ENV=development

# node-config directory path
NODE_CONFIG_DIR=./src/config

Project Structure

src/
|--config/                  # Environment variables and configuration-related files.
|--components/              # Contains individual components.
   |--component.module.js   # Entry file for the component.
   |--component.controller.js   # Controller for the component.
   |--component.service.js      # Service for the component.
   |--component.routes.js       # Routes for the component.
   |--component.validator.js    # Validators for the component.
|--docs/                    # Swagger files for API documentation.
|--middlewares/             # Custom Express middlewares.
|--db/                      # Sequelize ORM files for the data layer.
   |--models/               # Sequelize models.
   |--seeders/              # Sequelize seeders.
   |--migrations/           # Sequelize migrations.
|--utils/                   # Utility classes and functions.
|--loaders/                 # Lodash routes and configurations; also validates configurations.
|--support/                 # Wrapper for used packages, enabling easy package replacement.
|--app.js                   # Express app setup.
|--server.js                # Entry point for the application.

CLI Support

node-express-modular-architecture comes with cli support. Instead of creating components and files manully you can use command line tool to automate the process.

To create a new component simply run,

npm run create:component -- --name="ComponentNameHere"

API Documentation

API Endpoints

List of available routes:

Auth routes:
POST /v1/auth/register - register POST /v1/auth/login - login

Error Handling

The app has a centralized error handling mechanism, no try{..} catch() {..}

All errors are captured, logged and managed through one file: src/middlewares/error.js

It will log errors, debugs, and infos on console in development mode, and in production mode it also logs to files: logs/errors.log and logs/combined.log

The error handling middleware sends an error response, which has the following format:

{
  error: {
    "code": 404,
    "message": "Not found"
  }
}

When running in development mode, the error response also contains the error stack.

The app has a utility ApiError class to which you can attach a response code and a message, and then throw it from anywhere

For example, if you are trying to get a user from the DB who is not found, and you want to send a 404 error, the code should look something like:

const { NodeFoundError } = require('../utils/api-errors');
const { User } = require('../db/models');

const getUser = async (userId) => {
  const user = await User.findByPk(userId);
  if (!user) {
    throw new NotFoundError('User not found');
  }
};

Validation

Request data is validated using Joi. Check the documentation for more details on how to write Joi validation schemas.

The validation schemas are defined in the src/components/{eachComponent}/validations directory and are used in the routes by providing them as parameters to the validate middleware.

router.post(
  '/login',  
  makeValidatorCallback(AuthValidator.validateLogin), 
  makeExpressCallback(AuthController.login)
  );

Authentication

To require authentication for certain routes, you can use the auth middleware.

// Routes
const { AuthRoutes } =  require('../components/Auth/auth.module');
module.exports  =  function  getRoutes(app) {
app.use('/api/v1/auth', AuthRoutes);
};

These routes require a valid JWT access token in the Authorization request header using the Bearer schema. If the request does not contain a valid access token, an Unauthorized (401) error is thrown.

Generating Access Tokens:

An access token can be generated by making a successful call to the register (POST /v1/auth/register) or login (POST /v1/auth/login) endpoints. The response of these endpoints also contains refresh tokens (explained below).

An access token is valid for one day. You can modify this expiration time by changing the config variable in the config/default.yaml file.

JWT_SIGN_OPTIONS:
  issuer:  My Compny Pvt Ltd
  audience:  https://example.in
  expiresIn:  1d

Refreshing Access Tokens:

After the access token expires, a new access token can be generated, by making a call to the refresh token endpoint (POST /v1/auth/refresh-tokens) and sending along a valid refresh token in the request body. This call returns a new access token and a new refresh token.

An access token is valid for one day. You can modify this expiration time by changing the config variable in the config/development.yaml file.

Authorization

The auth middleware can also be used to require certain rights/permissions to access a route.

const express = require('express');
const auth = require('../../middlewares/auth');
const userController = require('../../controllers/user.controller');

const router = express.Router();

router.post('/users', auth('manageUsers'), userController.createUser);

In the example above, an authenticated user can access this route only if that user has the manageUsers permission.

The permissions are role-based. You can view the permissions/rights of each role in the src/config/roles.js file.

If the user making the request does not have the required permissions to access this route, a Forbidden (403) error is thrown.

Logging

Import the logger from src/config/logger.js. It is using the Winston logging library.

Logging should be done according to the following severity levels (ascending order from most important to least important):

const logger = require('<path to src>/config/logger');

logger.error('message'); // level 0
logger.warn('message'); // level 1
logger.info('message'); // level 2
logger.http('message'); // level 3
logger.verbose('message'); // level 4
logger.debug('message'); // level 5

In development mode, log messages of all severity levels will be printed to the console.

In production mode, only info, warn, and error logs will be printed to the console.
It is up to the server (or process manager) to actually read them from the console and store them in log files.
This app uses pm2 in production mode, which is already configured to store the logs in log files.

Note: API request information (request url, response code, timestamp, etc.) are also automatically logged (using morgan).

Linting

Linting is done using ESLint and Prettier.

In this app, ESLint is configured to follow the Airbnb JavaScript style guide with some modifications. It also extends eslint-config-prettier to turn off all rules that are unnecessary or might conflict with Prettier.

To modify the ESLint configuration, update the .eslintrc.json file. To modify the Prettier configuration, update the .prettierrc.json file.

To prevent a certain file or directory from being linted, add it to .eslintignore and .prettierignore.

To maintain a consistent coding style across different IDEs, the project contains .editorconfig

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome! Please check out the contributing guide.

Inspirations

• danielfsousa/express-rest-es2017-boilerplate
• madhums/node-express-mongoose
• kunalkapadia/express-mongoose-es6-rest-api

License

MIT