Hello world API - Homework Assignment #1

This application has been built as my first homework assignment of the Node.JS Master Class course

What this api does and why?

Basically it responds the endpoint /hello with a message { "message": "Hello World" } and status code 200 and every other endpoint with error 404.

The goal of this course is to learn how to use the native modules of the Node.JS and because of that I wasn't allowed to use third-part modules. That is why it is so simple. Because the goal here is to learn how to build a http server handler.

Project structure

• ./index.js : This file starts the node server;
• ./server : This module contains the handler of the server, in other words how it handles the requests and does the responses;
• ./server/https/ : This folder contains the certificates and if you clone this repo it also contains the command line instruction to create your own certificates;
• ./controllers : This module was created to allow expansion of the controllers and exports them as needed;
• ./controllers/hello : This module is my hello world controller, basically it exports a function that is called from the /server module;
• ./config : This module is responsible to export the configuration information. Basically we have the http and https ports.
• ./config/config.json : This file contains the environments configurations that are used in the ./config module.

Https Server

To initialize the HTTPS server you will need to create your certificates. Just ensure that you have openssl installed and execute the command on ./server/https/command.txt

Start the server

To start the server you can do one of the follow from the /:

Staging environment

$ node index.js

$ NODE_ENV=staging node index.js

Production environment

$ NODE_ENV=production node index.js

Why the two environments?

Again the goal here is not to put a hello world application in production of course but to learn how to deal with environment variables and how to use them to set different configurations.