Creating a server

Project setup

To get our project set up, we will initialise a Node project and install some dependencies:

npm init -y
npm install express dotenv
npm install -D nodemon

We will create two files, one where we configure the server application, and one where we run it:

mkdir server
touch server/app.js
touch server/start.js

We also create the .env file and put global configuration constants in there:

touch .env

PORT=5000

Configure the app

In server/app.js, we configure the server application.

import express from 'express'

const app = express()

app.use(express.json())

app.get('/hello', (req, res) => {
  res.json({ msg: 'Welcome to the Bleeter server!' })
})

export default app

Run the app

In server/start.js we import and run the configured application.

import app from './app.js`

const PORT = process.env.PORT

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

We add two scripts to package.json - start to run the server in production, and dev to run the server in development.

"scripts": {
  "start": "node server/start.js",
  "dev": "nodemon server/start.js"
}

Now we can run the server with hot-reloading:

bash

npm run dev

output

Server running on port 5000

Make a request

Now we can start our server with npm run dev and make a GET request to localhost:5000/hello to see the server return a message.

bash

curl localhost:5000/hello

output

{
  msg: 'Welcome to the Bleeter server!'
}