Express API Starter

Template repository for creating a Node.js + Express server with TypeScript

Getting Started

For this project, were are using docker to contain the application.

# Build the docker container for the first time
docker-compose up --build

# Run the existed docker container
docker-compose up

# Tear down the docker container
docker-compose down

Environment Variables

The express server expects a few environment variables to be included via a dev.env file. Create this file in the root of your project with the following keys:

SERVER_PORT=8081
DATABASE_HOST="localhost"
DATABASE_USER="starter"
DATABASE_PASSWORD="starter-dev"
DATABASE_NAME="express-starter-db"
DATABASE_PORT=5432

NOTE: The variables above are what this starter expects out of the box.

Database

This project is setup with a Docker Postgres image and uses pg for database migrations. All files for this database are inside of the ./postgres folder.

Tables

To set up your database tables, add your sql scripts inside of the ./postgres/tables folder. Once your files are in there, make sure to import them all in the ./posgres/deploy_tables.sql script.

Migrations

All migrations scripts can be found inside of the ./postgres/migrations folder. In the package.json there is a set of scripts for creating and running database migrations:

# Create a new migration file
yarn db:migrate-create <name_of_new_migration>

# Run all pending 'up' migrations
yarn db:migrate-up

# Run a single 'down' migration
yarn db:migrate-down

# Run N 'up' migrations
yarn db:migrate-up <number_to_run>

# Run N 'down' migrations
yarn db:migrate-down <number_to_run>

NOTE: these scripts must be run inside of the docker image's bash shell while it's running and can be accessed with the following command:

docker exec -it express-starter-api bash

Entering the psql terminal

To make use of the psql terminal run the following command while the postgres container is running:

docker exec -it express-starter-postgres psql -U starter -d express-starter-db

Available Endpoints

GET /v1/health - returns that the api is running