NODEJS-BOILERPLATE

A nodejs boilerplate, so that we can understand each other. this project was created in order to make sure that our back-end developers understand what they say and reduce confusions in our work space :/

• Production ready setup
• Custom built-in methods and modules for faster development
• Live reload and Full ES6 support and configuration
• Built-in unit testing methods
• Fully integrated with mongoose
• Basic sample api routes with express
• custom logging and middlewares for express
• Custom global data validators

SETTING UP FOR DEVELOPMENT

after cloning the repository, run npm i or yarn to install the packages. for running the project you can run both commands npm start or npm run dev., they both do the same thing so it's not so different anyway. Don't forget to change the project name inside package.json .

WHAT GOING ON UNDER THE HOOD?

nodejs-boilerplate uses backpack for building and bundling your es6 code and live reloading, which is easily configurable with the existing .babelrc in project root. project uses express to run the web servers and uses mongoose for setting up mongodb inside the project.

GETTING STARTED

ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLES

env files will be used for holding some of our static configuration data. for development purposes use .dev.env , the existing variables are:

1. DB_HOST which is the host domain for your mongodb url, default is localhost
2. DB_PORT is your mongodb port, default is 27017
3. DB_NAME is your database name, default is DUMMY_NAME_DEV
4. DB_USERNAME remote database username
5. DB_PASSWORD remote database password
6. JWT_SECRET jsonwebtoken hashing secret key, default is SECRET
7. API_PORT your express web server listens on this port, default is 3000 and for production use .env, boilerplate itself uses the related .env file based on the command you use, if it contains --production it'll use .env if not .dev.env will be used.

MIDDLEWARES

there are multiple built in middlewares mounted on express's request and response.

1. req.validate([]) which takes in an array of strings, what is actually does is it checks if the given strings exist inside your req.body, if they don't exist it sends a response with the status code 400.
2. res.validSend(statusCode, data) , used for sending responses back to the client and logs your status and data. NOTE: console.log is disabled in production mode.
3. Auth which performs authentication on your jwt, you can import it where ever you want in your routes as a middleware, it's located in /src/app/middlewares/Auth.js.
4. CORS is handled by default in middlewares but you can customized it /src/app/middlewares/CORS.js

GLOBAL METHODS

global method are defined inside /src/globals/methods.js. methods are accessible by using global.methodName()

1. validateMail,validates email addresses, returns a Boolean
2. validatePhone
3. digitSeperator seperates digits by putting comma between them.
4. toFarsi changes numbers to persian numbers.
5. dasher replaces spaces with - , makes string url friendly
6. undasher reverse dasher
7. chunkArray(array, chunk_size), chunks arrays.
8. getStringBetween(str, one, two) returns the string between two given characters
9. getStringFrom(str, one) returns the string after the given character.

DEPLOYMENT

you can build your code bundle by running the command npm run build, the run the build file as you wish or you can directly run npm run production to build and run your project, note that in production build console.log is disabled and only console.error works in order to make your log file in production lighter, you can enable log by commenting out the following code in /src/index.js. if (process.env.projectMode === 'Production') console.log = function() {}

TESTING

nodejs-boilerplates uses Ava for running tests and Supertest for mocking and testing apis. test files are located inside test folder at the root of project, all files ending with .test.js are used for testing when test command is used. there are existing sample test inside index.test.js that test a couple apis.

TEST COMMANDS

1. npm run test runs test and keeps watching for changes in your code to run the tests again
2. npm run remove-ava-cache removes ava's cache.

CREDITS

this project is a wrap-around and maintained version of mrTech's backpack-bolierplate