Introduction

This project enables the development of APIs with NodeJS.

Installation

curl https://github.com/chainhead/scaffold/ | bash

Usage

Folder structure

Development - pre-requisites

OS requirements

1. The logging mechanism in this project outputs a time-stamp. To ensure that, the timestamp matches a specific timezone, the operating system must expose timezone for moment.js to consume. Typically, this happens with a TZ environment variable set to e.g. Asia/Kolkata.
2. All configuration is pushed as a JSON object from an environment variable APP_CONFIG. This variable name maybe changed as required. TODO: Support for configuration files instead of environment variables.

Secure transport

1. The design decision for securing the communication betwen this server and a client is to have TLS communication terminated before it hits this server. Such a TLS termination maybe done with e.g. Nginx where, load balancing may also be set-up.

Launching

Launching of an application can be one of the following ways:

1. Deployed as a project on a VM with pm2.
2. Deployed as a Docker container.
3. Deployed to a OpenShift cluster with build as:
   1. Source to Image
   2. Docker
   3. Pipeline

Development

The following guidelines changes may be applied for project files.

index.js

1. Change logger.info message in run() for different message before starting up the server.
2. During start-up, index.js will establish connection to a cache (e.g. Redis) in cache/connect.js and a authorisation server (e.g. LDAP) in auth/connect.js. If more connections are needed then, create the following as shown in examples below. The connection configuration should be added into the APP_CONFIG environment variable.
   1. db/connect.js - For connecting to an RDBMS e.g. Postgres
   2. msg/connect.js - For connecting to a messaging system e.g. Kafka

routes/app.js

1. More middleware maybe added as required.
2. Each middleware maybe edited as required.
3. For an end-point such as app.get('/services), the following is expected: Note that, the file name matches the REST resource to enable traceability.
   1. mw/mservices.js - Payload specific checks.
   2. routes/rservices.js - Entry-point for business logic.
   3. utils/uservices.js - Helper functions for business logic.
   4. cache/cservices.js - Cache queries (CRUD) to be invoked by any of the above.