Node.js app in the real world : deployment, decorators, going further

This is Part 5 of a 5-part series.

Part 0 was the introduction, Part 1 was about structuring your application and coding style, Part 2 was about persisting our domain, setting up the HTTP interface. Part 3 was about authentication, access control and error handling. Part 4 was about CLI commands, commenting, documenting and testing our REST API written in JavaScript under Node.js with a Koa server, a Mongodb database and the Mongoose ODM. This final part will be about deploying and some “advanced” tips and tricks.

Let’s dive into getting in production and go further ! Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

How to deploy in production ?

Configuration files

Before deploying in production, you have to differentiate your dev, test and prod environnements. One way to do it is to have the following structure :

config/
  environments/
    dev.js
    prod.js
    test.js
  app.js
  db.js
  cache.js
  index.js

In your database configuration file, you’ll have something like this :

config/db.js

const dbConfig = {
  dev: {
    host: ‘localhost’,
    port: ‘27017’,
    database: ‘myApp_dev’,
    auth: false
  },
  test: {
    host: ‘localhost’,
    port: ‘27017’,
    database: ‘myApp_test’,
    auth: false
  },
  prod…