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That’s because, at one point in this tutorial, we’ll need to interact with MongoDB directly rather than via our Node.js code. We won’t explain the specifics of Mongoose and MongoDB that are used here, but to get the basics running, simply start the server in interactive mode (i.e., from the command line as mongo) rather than as a service. Next, make sure that you have MongoDB installed. For this article, I’ll be using version 14.9.0 it may also work on older versions. (Dejan Milosevic’s great article on JWT for secure REST applications in Java goes into further detail about this the principles are the same.) REST API Tutorial Setupįirst of all, make sure that you have the latest Node.js version installed. To that end, we will create another resource called auth that will expect a user’s email and password and, in return, will generate the token used for authentication on certain operations. We will also be using JSON web tokens (JWTs) for access tokens. DELETE on the endpoint /users/:userId (remove a specific user).

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PATCH on the endpoint /users/:userId (update the data for a specific user).

GET on the endpoint /users/:userId (get a specific user).

GET on the endpoint /users (list all users).

POST on the endpoint /users (create a new user).

permissionLevel (what is this user allowed to do?)Īnd we will create the following operations for that resource:.

Our resource will have the following basic structure: In this tutorial, we are going to create a pretty common (and very practical) REST API for a resource called users. As mentioned before, the same foundation will be used to integrate third-party features, most of which likewise use REST APIs, making such integration faster.įor now, let’s start creating our secure REST API using Node.js!

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And by implementing the pattern, we will have a stable and easily understandable foundation enabling us to evolve the code rapidly and maintain it afterward.

Using these HTTP operations and a resource name as an address, we can build a REST API by creating an endpoint for each operation.

GET (retrieve an index of resources or an individual resource).

POST (create a resource or generally provide data).

These operations are integral to the HTTP protocol and represent essential create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionality, although not in a clean one-to-one manner: REST APIs are used to access and manipulate data using a common set of stateless operations.

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Note: We won’t cover a front-end codebase here, but the fact that our back end is written in JavaScript makes it convenient to share code-object models, for instance-throughout the full stack. Mongoose, which will connect our back end to a MongoDB databaseĭevelopers following this tutorial should also be comfortable with the terminal (or command prompt).Express, which vastly simplifies building out common web server tasks under Node.js and is standard fare in building a REST API back end.Node.js, which the reader should already have some familiarity with.While a multitude of platforms and programming languages can be used for the task-e.g., ASP.NET Core, Laravel (PHP), or Bottle (Python)-in this tutorial, we’ll build a basic but secure REST API back end using the following stack: The de facto standard they use for this is called REpresentational State Transfer (REST). These enable other developers to easily integrate features like social media logins, credit card payments, and behavior tracking. It’s quite common nowadays for online services to have public-facing APIs.

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They enable software to communicate with other pieces of software-internal or external-consistently, which is a key ingredient in scalability, not to mention reusability. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are everywhere.

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