Express Postgres Starter

A starter project for Node.js with Express and Postgres

Setup

Pre-requisites:

• Docker for Desktop

Run docker-compose up in the root of the project.

It will bring up Postgres and the Express application server in development mode.

It binds the application server to localhost:3000, this can be re-mapped this by changing the first 3000 in 3000:3000 of ./docker-compose.yaml).

Postgres is exposed on port 35432. The connection string is postgres://user:pass@localhost:35432/db (username, password and database name are defined in ./docker-compose.yaml).

You can connect to Postgres using the psql client:

psql -h 127.0.0.1 -U user -W -d db

The default Docker CMD is npm start, ./docker-compose.yaml overrides this to npm run dev which runs the application using nodemon (auto-restart on file change).

Express API setup

The Express API is located in ./src/api.

Applications routes for resources are defined in ./src/api/index.js.

Global concerns like security, cookie parsing, body parsing and request logging are handled in ./server.js.

This application loosely follows the Presentation Domain Data Layering:

• Presentation is dealt with in the ./src/api folder
• Domain is dealt with in the ./src/modules folder. It's currently non-existent since we've only got generic user and session resources.
• Data is dealt with in the ./src/persistence folder

Database setup + management

npm run migrate up will run the migrations.

npm run migrate down will roll back the migrations.

npm run migrate:create <migration-name> will create a new migration file in ./src/migrations.

To run the migrations inside of docker-compose. Which will run a bash instance inside the app container.

docker-compose run app bash

Followed by:

npm run migrate up

Session/Authentication management

Session management is done through a custom sessions table, /api/session endpoints (see ./src/api/session.js) and leveraging client-sessions.