Best Practice to Structure REST API Using Express with NodeJS

Question

This is a stand-alone broker application. I'm new to Express and Node, so I would like some advice on how to architect the structure of this application.

Starting off:

I have just an app.js file that is the server and opens the web socket.
Another (router.js) that has the Router(), and a list of REST calls.

However, this application is going to have a lot of REST calls, and is expecting a lot of data coming in and requests going out. So just having a list of get, post, etc. calls in router.js can get disorganized very quickly. Is there a better way to design this application?

Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-01 17:47:16Z

2

create separate files for "contained" routes. For instance:

// stored as ./routes/abc.js
var middleware = require("../lib/middleware");
module.exports = {
  setup: function(app) {
    app.get("/abc/def", middleware.fn1, middleware.fn2, ..., this.def);
    app.get("/abc/[...]", this.[...]);
  },
  def: function(req, res) {
  },
  ...
}

and then in your ./routes/index.js something like:

var abc = require("abc");
module.exports = function(app) {
  ...
  abc.setup(app);
  ...
};

and then finally of course in your app.js, you get:

var express = require("express"),
    app = express();
require("routes")(app);
var port = process.env.PORT || 12345;
app.listen(port, function() {
  console.log('Listening on port %d', port);
});

edited Nov 1, 2014 at 17:47

answered Oct 31, 2014 at 23:10

Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans

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1 Comment

PeterVC Over a year ago

I like the technique but would recommend not naming the method 'bind' as maintainers may confuse it with the prototype 'bind' method.

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