Getting started

# Clone the project
git clone [email protected]:caxy/express-api-starter-kit.git
cd express-api-starter-kit

# Make it your own
rm -rf .git && git init && yarn init
cp .env.example .env

# Install dependencies
yarn install

Then you can begin development:

yarn dev

This will launch a nodemon process for automatic server restarts when your code changes.

Testing

Testing is powered by Jest. This project also uses supertest for demonstrating a simple routing smoke test suite. Feel free to remove supertest entirely if you don't wish to use it.

Start the test runner in watch mode with:

yarn test

You can also generate coverage with:

yarn test --coverage

Linting

Linting is set up using ESLint. It uses ESLint's default eslint:recommended rules. Feel free to use your own rules and/or extend another popular linting config (e.g. airbnb's or standard).

Begin linting in watch mode with:

yarn run lint

To begin linting and start the server simultaneously, edit the package.json like this:

"dev": "nodemon src/index.js --exec \"node -r dotenv/config -r babel-register\" | npm run lint"

Environmental variables in development

The project uses dotenv for setting environmental variables during development. Simply copy .env.example, rename it to .env and add your env vars as you see fit.

It is strongly recommended never to check in your .env file to version control. It should only include environment-specific values such as database passwords or API keys used in development. Your production env variables should be different and be set differently depending on your hosting solution. dotenv is only for development.

Deployment

Deployment is specific to hosting platform/provider but generally:

yarn build

##PM2

A common tool we use for deploying and running node processes is PM2.

It used a ecosystem.config.js file to start single or multiple processes in different modes for load balancing.

Copy the .dist as a starting place, any .env variables created should be added here. ####NOTE. Do not include any Private credentials in the .dist.

cp ecosystem.config.js.dist ecosystem.config.js

To start the server, ensure pm2 is installed properly, then run:

yarn deploy

This will install latest packages, build the project, and reload the config in pm2. This command is safe to use with Jenkins deployments.