CRUD app using Node.JS, Express & MongoDB

This article will help beginners to get started with NodeJs from scratch and build a rest api and extend it to complete MERN app in the upcoming articles.

MERN Application

Prerequisites :

1. Knowledge of HTML, CSS , JAVASCRIPT and ReactJs as we are going to talk about all this tech in upcoming articles.
2. Javascript Fundamentals like creating express JS server.
3. Keep motivated to learn.

Tools I Prefer:

1. Code Editor I like to use Visual studio code.As this is the best editor I know. Let me know if you know any better options than this.
2. Postman to test api endpoints.

Get Started:

First thing first we will navigate to the directory were we want to initialize our package.json. Once we navigate to the directory we are going to run this command to create package.json npm init -y once we hit enter we will be able to see package.json file created. Inside here we will create a directory name app inside it create a file name app.js This will look something like this. Later we will create all other directories as well. At the end this is how our file structure will look.

Now Inside package.json inside scripts we will add two line one to run using node and other running with nodemon npm package. This will look something like this.

Once done with this we are going to install some of the packages that we are going to need. To install all packages we will run npm command in our terminal. Like this

npm install -D nodemon Here -D stands for dev dependence.

We are going to add some dependences as well at start we will need to run these command to install ExpressJs, body-parser and mongoose we are going to use mongoDB for our database so we will use moongoose Its a data modeling tool for mongoDB database. We will run this line in our terminal.

npm install express body-parser mongoose

Once these steps are done we will move forward to our app.js file and initialize our server using. Here is how it will look after implementing all three above packages.

Here I am using MongoDB Atlas this url here will connect us to mongodb database with database name mern-app . I have also added post route on line 15. And imported postRouter on line 2. I will create that file in a moment in routes directory.

After setting our app.js First thing we are going to do is create a Post model here is how the code looks like. Inside model we are going to provide all the field that we are going to save in database related to post.

After adding Post Model we will move forward inside Routes directory I will create a file name postRoutes here we will have all the routes related with posts. Here it will look something like this after adding all 4 CRUD routes.

Here I have added one more package called express-validator this help us to validate incoming data.

On line 2 I have imported postController we will create that in a moment. But First of all let look into express-validator we have use body here from express validator and title should be length more than 5 and content should me more the 10 is being validated.

Now Here we look into the post controller where all the functionality stays. Let’s see the code first.

Here I have added functions for post image upload as you can see that in post create function. And For Image Upload we need to install one more package name multer you can install it by running this command npm install multer After installing this we need to add some additional settings in our app.js Here you can see complete code below.

Here this is how you can create a curd api with express js. In the next post we will add authentication.

Link to video tutorial.