REST API Demo - Fall 2023

This is a simple REST API from our "Backend Basics" workshop. This API is a fake social media service, where users can create, read, update, and delete text posts.

While this project is a simple demonstration, feel free to use it as a starting point if you're new to writing backends in TypeScript. Check out the workshop on our YouTube for a walkthrough of this entire project!

Setup && Running the Project

• Install NodeJS and MongoDB on your device.
• In a terminal window, run mongod to launch a local database.
• Run git clone https://github.com/ufssd/restapi-fall23.git in your terminal to download this project.
• Copy .env.example into a new file called .env
• CD into the project folder and run npm install.
• Run npm run dev to start the server on localhost:4000. If you want, you can change the port number in .env
• We also recommend using Postman to send HTTP requests to the server.

If you want to customize any project settings, check out our JavaScript/TypeScript workshop to learn more about Node, TypeScript, and NPM!

Project Structure && Architecture

All code is inside src, and the backend's entry point is src/main.ts.

The posts folder contains all the code for the post feature.

• postRoutes.ts is where API routes are defined, and where HTTP requests and responses are handled.
• postDAO.ts handles database interaction (DAO stands for Data Access Object).
• postModel.ts defines a data model for posts in our database. This deals with differences in how posts are represented in our code and how they're respresented in the database.

If you want to add additional features for your own backend, we recommend adding additional folders like posts for each feature you have. Check out the workshop recording for more architecture details.