This is a simple Node/Express API to retrieve and caption images. The users can view a list of images with their captions and register to create captions themselves.
- The project is part of the Back-end Engineer Curriculum from Codecademy
- The challenge was to build an API providing basic CRUD functionality with authentication/authorization and a proper API documentation
- I deviated from the project requirements by building the API in TypeScript instead of JavaScript because I wanted to gain experience handling TypeScript in an Node.js environment
- I also used Prisma as an ORM instead of Sequelize because of its compatibility with TypeScript
- Express 4.18.2
- Typescript 4.8.4
- Prisma 4.5.0
- swagger-jsdoc 6.2.5
- swagger-ui-express 4.6.0
- Supabase
- Bcrypt 5.1.0
- Dotenv 16.0.3
- Jsonwebtoken 8.5.1
- Morgan 1.10.0
- Node-cache 5.1.2
- Uuid 9.0.0
- Register / login / edit / delete users
- Create / retrieve / update / delete images
- Create / retrieve / update / delete captions for specific images
- Authentication / authorization (e.g., only registered users can create captions, only admins can create/upload images) using auth tokens (JWT)
- Obtain / validate refreshTokens by providing an accessToken
- Caching images to allow quick retrieval
Live demo here.
The dependencies which are necessary to run this app can be found in the package.json file. Node needs to be installed on your system. You also need a running PostgreSQL database instance.
- Clone the repo.
- Navigate to the project folder in the terminal and install the necessary NPM dependencies.
npm install
- Create a .env file in the root directory with the following environment variables.
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE?schema=SCHEMA" (connection URL to your database)
PORT=5000
JWT_ACCESS_SECRET=SECRET123
JWT_REFRESH_SECRET=ANOTHER_SECRET123
- Run the command in your terminal to seed the database with some data.
npx prisma migrate reset
- Run the command in your terminal to start the server.
npm run start
- Go to localhost:5000/api-docs to get to the API documentation. There you can test the API endpoints.
- Building an application with Vite
- Designing an API from scratch
- Building an Node/Express application in TypeScript for type-safety (e.g., implementing types for request / response objects)
- Setting up Prisma (Model, Migration, Seeding)
- Writing database queries using Prisma (Concept of Cascading)
- Error-Handling with Prisma / Typescript
- Setting up and using Swagger to create an API documentation
- Segregate the project into small and simple tasks to better manage the scope of it
- Deciding which API endpoints to create / expose and which not (used way too many for this project)
This project is basically finished. In the future I may extend this project to a full-stack application by providing a front-end as well. Then I may also implement a voting system to rank images / captions.
- This project is part of the Codecademy Back-end engineer curriculum.