Mastering Node.js: A Comprehensive Guide to Building a REST API with Express.js and MongoDB 🚀

Step 1: Setting up the Environment 🏗️

The first step in our journey is to set up our development environment. Start by installing Node.js and MongoDB. You can download Node.js from the official website and MongoDB from the official MongoDB website.

# Install Node.js and npm
npm install -g node

# Install MongoDB
brew install mongodb

The command brew is for macOS, read the MongoDB installation docs for system specific commands.

Step 2: Initialize Your Project 🎬

Now, let's initialize a new Node.js project. Navigate to the directory where you want your project to be and run the following command:

# Initialize
npm init -y

This command will create a new package.json file in your directory. This file will keep track of your project's dependencies.

Step 3: Install Express.js 🚀

Next, we will install Express.js, which is a fast, unopinionated, and minimalist web framework for Node.js.

# Install Express
npm install express --save

After the installation process is completed, you can confirm that Express.js has been added as a dependency in the package.json file.

Step 4: Create Your App 👷‍♀️

Now, let's go ahead and create an app.js file in our root directory. This file will house the code for creating an Express application.

# Create app.js
touch app.js

The touch command works on mac and Linux terminals but not powershall

Open the app.js file and add the following code to create a basic Express app:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = 3000;

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('Hello World! 👋');
});

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`App listening at http://localhost:${port}`);
});

Step 5: Install and Set Up MongoDB 🧪

Next, let's install Mongoose, an Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js. Mongoose provides a straightforward, schema-based approach to model your application data and includes built-in type casting, validation, and more.

# Install Mongoose
npm install mongoose --save

Following the installation, we will connect our application to MongoDB. Remember to replace <dbURL> with your actual MongoDB connection string.

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
mongoose.connect('<dbURL>', {useNewUrlParser: true, useUnifiedTopology: true});

And voila! 🎊 We've successfully set up our environment and created the foundation for our REST API. We will delve into more details about creating, reading, updating, and deleting data through our API in the following posts. Stay tuned.

References:

1. Node.js
2. MongoDB
3. Express.js
4. Mongoose

📝 Note: As technology evolves rapidly, some of the links provided might get outdated.

Happy Coding! 👩‍💻🎈