zijizhu / express-starter

Express Starter

This repository is a working express.js server for quickly scaffolding the backend of my future projects. It provides a basic folder structure and takes care of (session based) user authentication. It is opinionated and may not suit some usecases.

Features

• TypeScript
• PostgreSQL with Prisma ORM
• Session authentication with express-sesssion and passport.js
• Redis store for persisting session data

Get Started

Pre-reqs

1. Node.js
2. Yarn
3. PostgreSQL
4. Redis

Development

First, create a .env file to let node access environment variables

# Only needed for development
touch .env

Then, add environment variables to .env For DATABASE_URL, see this Prisma guide

PORT=<port-number>
SESSION_SECRET=<your-session-secret>
REDIS_URL=<redis-server-url>
DATABASE_URL=<postgresql-server-url>

Make sure both PostgreSQL and Redis are running. Finally, install dependencies and start the server

# Install dependencies
yarn install

# Compile TypeScript source code into JavsScript and watch for changes
yarn watch

# Open a new terminal, start developing
yarn dev

Deployment

This server is able to run on Heroku (free tier) via docker To deploy on Heroku, please make sure:

1. You have Docker installed.
2. You have a Heroku account and have Heroku Cli installed.

Then please follow this Heroku Guide. After creating the app by heroku create, you need to install Heroku PostgreSQL and Redis addons for the app to work properly:

• Heroku Postgres
• Heroku Redis

Testing

There aren't any tests yet. However, Jest should work great with this project.