Node Tactics

Web Development

Node.js REST APIs

Building REST APIs

Node.js REST APIs use Express with CRUD endpoints and JSON.

Introduction to REST APIs with Node.js and Express

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications. In this guide, we'll explore how to create REST APIs using Node.js and Express. Express is a fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js that simplifies the process of setting up a web server and building APIs.

Setting Up Your Project

To start, ensure you have Node.js installed on your machine. You can verify this by running node -v and npm -v in your terminal.

Next, create a new directory for your project and initialize it with npm:

This command will generate a package.json file with default settings. Now, install Express:

Creating a Simple Express Server

Let's set up a basic Express server. Create a file named server.js in your project directory:

In this code, we import Express and create an instance of it. We then define a route handler for the root URL ('/'), which sends a welcome message. Finally, we start the server on the specified port.

Understanding CRUD Operations

CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. These are the four basic operations you can perform on resources via REST APIs. Let's implement each operation in our API.

Creating CRUD Endpoints

We'll define a simple in-memory array to simulate a database and create routes to handle CRUD operations on this data:

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