POST (create a resource or generally provide data).

These operations are integral to the HTTP protocol and represent essential create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionality, although not in a clean one-to-one manner: REST APIs are used to access and manipulate data using a common set of stateless operations. Note: We won’t cover a front-end codebase here, but the fact that our back end is written in JavaScript makes it convenient to share code-object models, for instance-throughout the full stack.

Mongoose, which will connect our back end to a MongoDB database.ĭevelopers following this tutorial should also be comfortable with the terminal (or command prompt).

Express.js, which vastly simplifies building out common web server tasks and is standard fare in building a Node.js REST API back end.

Node.js, which the reader should already have some familiarity with.

So in this tutorial, our basic but secure REST API back end will focus on components common among JavaScript developers: The de facto standard they use for this is called representational state transfer (REST).Īnd why build a Node.js REST API, in particular? While a multitude of platforms and programming languages can be used for the task-like ASP.NET Core, Laravel (PHP), or Bottle (Python)-JavaScript remains the most popular language among professional developers.

These enable other developers to easily integrate features like social media logins, credit card payments, and behavior tracking.

It’s quite common nowadays for online services to have public-facing APIs. They enable software to communicate with other pieces of software-internal or external-consistently, which is a key ingredient in scalability, not to mention reusability. It has been modified to include recent sources and to align with our current editorial standards.Īpplication programming interfaces (APIs) are everywhere. Editor’s note: This article was updated on Decemby our editorial team.

Node api