One of the main reasons for using Node.js is that you can create quickly RESTful web APIs with it. is a popular web framework helping you with this task. Using JavaScript to build servers is often a natural choice for frontend developers looking for a way to reuse their skills and create the APIs supporting their web app, but that's not the only benefit of using Node.js. The huge package around Node.js and Express is what makes it shine, allowing to implement a lot of business features with very few lines of code. Express ecosystem My friend will walk through what you need to get started, with short videos that run for less than 5 min each. Christopher Harrison What you'll learn here What is Express and how it can be used to create web APIs Handle routing with parameters Receive and parse JSON data Use HTTP verbs to create a RESTful CRUD API Additional learning resources Interactive in-depth tutorial on Node.js filesystem Source code of the demonstrated API Express reference REST Client extension for VS Code Use CosmosDB with a Node.js app nodemon on GitHub Introducing Node.js and Express When you want to create a web API using Express, you'll probably also need other packages as well to help you work more efficiently. for example is a little helper that allows you to automatically restart your server when you make changes to the code. Let's discover what Express can help you with, and what are the packages that you'll want in almost all your server projects. nodemon Create a GET API One of the first steps that come after initializing the Express server instance is creating a simple API that. To do that you'll need to use the router to create a new endpoint, and leverage the Express API to create the HTTP response, all with very few lines of code. GET Handle routing with parameters When you're building a REST API, you need to retrieve parameters from the URL so you can extract IDs from it to access specific resources. The router object can help you with that, and by using patterns to define the routes you can make Express to extract the data for you. Receive and parse JSON data Express by itself is not enough to create a endpoint that receives JSON. You'll need to use extra middlewares, like to be able to parse and use data coming from a client web app. Let's take a closer look. POST body-parser Create update and delete APIs To complete our API and make it a full ( reate, ead, pdate and elete) API, we finally have to add the and endpoints. Let's see how it differs from Read and Create and put the finishing touch to our server. CRUD C R U D UPDATE DELETE What's next You should now have the ground to create your own API with Node.js and Express. If you want, you can also take a look at what we built looks like. the final API If you would like to deepen your knowledge, you can also take a look at this . Once you start building your API, one of the next steps is usually to plug in a database. You can take a look at to learn how to create and connect a instance to a Node.js app. If you've never heard about CosmosDB, it's a hosted distributed database that supports multiples connectors, including , a popular choice among Node.js developers. interactive in-depth tutorial on Node.js and Express this tutorial CosmosDB MongoDB Thanks for reading! Also published at https://dev.to/azure/build-a-web-api-with-node-js-and-express-16fk

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