Easy steps to build a simple CRUD app with Node, Express and MongoDB.

(Backend)

After understood how to work with Node, I wanted to write an easy and comprehensive guideline for a full Crud using Express and MongoDB.

create the application folder

mkdir todo-app
cd todo-app

create the backend folder

mkdir todo-backend

create the front end react app

npx create-react-app todo-frontend

now you should have a folder structure like so

todo-app
    - todo-backend
    - todo-frontend
        - node_modules
        - public
        - src
        - package.json
        - .gitignore
        - README.md

Building backend

navigate to the todo-backend folder cd todo-backend

and run npm init -y

It will create a package.json files and we will also install other packages that we will need to build the express server

npm install express  express-validator mongoose 

• ExpressJS — is the server framework with Node JS under the hood.
• express-validator— express-validator is a set of express.js that check the validation of the user input.
• mongoose — high level API for interacting with our MongoDB database.

And install the dependency

npm install -D nodemon concurrently 

• Nodemon — This tools allows you to edit your server files and see the change propagate in real time without starting the server each time.
• Concurrently — Run multiple commands concurrently, we will use it to run the frond and back in one command.

create the index.js which will store our server initialization logic and inside let ‘s copy this code:

const express = require('express'); // our express server
const app = express(); // generate an app object
app.get('/',(req,res)=> res.send('Api Running')); // sending a get request to test our app
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 5000; 
//port that the server is running on => localhost:5000
app.listen(PORT, () => {
  // listening on port 5000
  console.log(`listening on port ${PORT}`) // print this when the server starts
})

Run the server use this command line: nodemon index.js then open the browser at http://localhost:5000/ and if no surprise we should see our message displayed.