Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
47 lines (35 loc) · 3.62 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

47 lines (35 loc) · 3.62 KB
Raw

BackEnd

Getting started

To get the Node server running locally:

  • Clone this repo
  • npm install to install all required dependencies
  • npm update to update all required dependencies
  • Install MongoDB Community Edition (instructions) and run it by executing mongod
  • npm run dev to start the local server

Code Overview

Dependencies

  • @kubernetes/client-node - A Kubernetes client for node
  • archiver - A streaming interface for archive generation
  • cors - Node.js CORS middleware
  • express - The server for handling and routing HTTP requests
  • express-jwt - Middleware for validating JWTs for authentication
  • fs-extra - It contains methods that aren't included in the vanilla Node.js fs package. Such as recursive mkdir, copy, and remove
  • helmet - Help secure Express/Connect apps with various HTTP headers
  • jsonwebtoken - For generating JWTs used by authentication
  • mongoose - For modeling and mapping MongoDB data to javascript
  • mongoose-unique-validator - For handling unique validation errors in Mongoose. Mongoose only handles validation at the document level, so a unique index across a collection will throw an exception at the driver level. The mongoose-unique-validator plugin helps us by formatting the error like a normal mongoose ValidationError.
  • morgan - HTTP request logger middleware for node.js
  • passport - For handling user authentication
  • rimraf - A deep deletion module for node (like rm -rf)
  • slug - For encoding titles into a URL-friendly format

Application Structure

  • app.js - The entry point to our application. This file defines our express server and connects it to MongoDB using mongoose. It also requires the routes and models we'll be using in the application.
  • clients/ - This folder contains the clients for some external API such as swift.
  • configs/ - This folder contains configuration for passport as well as a central location for configuration/environment variables.
  • libs/ - This folder contains librairies used for our BackEnd.
  • models/ - This folder contains the schema definitions for our Mongoose models.
  • routes/ - This folder contains the route definitions for our API.

Error Handling

In routes/api/index.js, we define a error-handling middleware for handling Mongoose's ValidationError. This middleware will respond with a 422 status code and format the response to have [error messages the clients can understand]

Authentication

Requests are authenticated using the Authorization header with a valid JWT. We define two express middlewares in routes/auth.js that can be used to authenticate requests. The required middleware configures the express-jwt middleware using our application's secret and will return a 401 status code if the request cannot be authenticated. The payload of the JWT can then be accessed from req.payload in the endpoint. The optional middleware configures the express-jwt in the same way as required, but will not return a 401 status code if the request cannot be authenticated.