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Beginning Node.js, Express & MongoDB Development

Creating the Backend

Learn how to create a back-end server using Node.js.

We'll cover the following...

In this lesson, we'll start building our back-end server. The package.json file created previously has been provided below for reference:

{
  "name": "backend",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "cors": "^2.8.5",
    "dotenv": "^16.0.1",
    "express": "^4.18.1",
    "mongodb": "^4.8.1"
  }
}
package.json

Adding express and cors middleware

Our backend uses the ES6 import statement. So before we start creating the backend, we need to add the import statement to our package.json.

C++
{
"name": "backend",
"version": "1.0.0", 
"description": "", 
"main": "index.js", 
"type": "module", 
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1" },
...

This will use the import statements from ES6. Now, let’s create a new file server.js in the backend folder with the following code:

Javascript (babel-node)
import express from 'express'
import cors from 'cors'
import movies from './api/movies.route.js'
const app = express()
app.use(cors()) 
app.use(express.json())
app.use("/api/v1/movies", movies) 
app.use('*', (req,res)=>{
  res.status(404).json({error: "not found"}) 
})
export default app

Lines 1–3: First, we import the express and cors middleware. We also import movie.route.js (a separate file that we’ll create later to store our routes).

Line 5: We create the server.

Lines 6–7: For functionality, we attach the cors and express.json middleware to the Express server we created. The JSON parsing middleware express.json enables the server to read and accept JSON in a request’s body.

Lines 9–12: We specify the initial routes for our application.

Note: The general convention for API URLs is to begin it with /api/<version number>. And since our API is about movies, the main URL for our application will be /api/v1/movies. The subsequent specific routes are specified in the second ...