Express Starter Project

This example project is the first in a series toward building a complete full-stack web application using Node.js and Express to create a RESTful API on the backend that connects to a database, and then a Vue single page application on the frontend.

In doing so, we’ll explore some of the standard ways web developers use existing tools, frameworks, and libraries to perform many of the operations we’ve learned how to do manually throughout this course. In essence, you’ve already learned how to build these things from scratch, but now we’ll look at how professionals use dependencies to accomplish many of the same things.

We’ll also explore techniques for writing good, clean JavaScript code that includes documentation and API information, unit testing, and more.

Finally, we’ll learn how to do all of this using GitHub Codespaces, so everything runs directly in the web browser with no additional software or hardware needed. Of course, you can also do everything locally using Docker Desktop and Visual Studio Code as well.

Project Deliverables

At the end of this example, we will have a project with the following features:

1. A working GitHub Codespace containing Node.js
2. A bare-bones Express application
3. Update Express application from CommonJS to ES Modules
4. Application logs with Winston and Morgan
5. Install other useful Express libraries
6. A better development server using Nodemon
7. A tool for managing environment variables
8. Code documentation with JSDoc and OpenAPI comments
9. Linting and Formatting with ESLint and Prettier

Let’s get started!