Contacts Management System - Node JS & Express

Building a Contact Management System with Node and Express. My Notes will be stored here.

Setting Up:

• Initialize a new Node Project:

    npm init

During initialization, set your entry point to server.js , a file which you create on your own.

• Install Nodemon as a dev dependency:

    npm i nodemon -D

• In your package.json file, set your npm start and npm run dev commands to run server.js:

 "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "dev": "nodemon server.js",
    "start": "node server.js"
  }

• Install Express & DotEnv (To help with the usage of environment variables) :

    npm i express
    npm i dotenv

• Create your server.js file and set up a server:

const express = require("express");
const dotenv = require("dotenv").config();

const app = express();

const port = process.env.PORT || 5000;

//Middleware for API Routes
// "/api/contacts" is the route prefix all my endpoints will use.
// "./routes/contactRoutes" is the path to the folder that contains all my routes
app.use("/api/contacts", require("./routes/contactRoutes"));

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server running on port ${port}!`);
});

• Set up your routes. Best practice is to have the routes in a route folder:

const express = require("express");
const router = express.Router();

router.route("/").get((req, res) => {
  res.status(200).json({ message: "Get All Contacts" });
});
router.route("/").post((req, res) => {
  res.status(200).json({ message: "Create Contact" });
});
router.route("/:id").put((req, res) => {
  res
    .status(200)
    .json({ message: `Update Contact with specified ID ${req.params.id}` });
});
router.route("/:id").delete((req, res) => {
  res
    .status(200)
    .json({ message: `Delete Contact with specified ID ${req.params.id}` });
});

module.exports = router;

• Have a .gitignore file that does not track your node_modules folder and your .env file.