Building a RESTful API with Node.js, Express.js, and MongoDB — Part 1

Part 1: Introduction and Setup

In today’s digital age, APIs are an integral part of web and mobile development. With Node.js and Express.js, creating a powerful and scalable API has never been easier. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the process of creating an API using Node.js and Express.js with Mongoose as the database ORM.

Before we dive into the code, let’s take a moment to understand what Node.js, Express.js, and Mongoose are and why they are so popular.

Node.js is a powerful, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that allows developers to run JavaScript outside of a web browser. It is built on top of the V8 JavaScript engine and provides a non-blocking, event-driven I/O model that is perfect for building scalable, data-intensive applications.

Express.js is a minimalist and flexible web framework for Node.js that provides a set of robust features for building web and mobile applications. It is built on top of Node.js and provides a simple, yet powerful, API for building HTTP servers, handling requests and responses, and routing.

Mongoose is a powerful Object-Document Mapping (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js. It provides a simple, yet powerful, API for interacting with MongoDB databases and makes it easy to define schemas, validate data, and perform CRUD operations.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what Node.js, Express.js, and Mongoose are, let’s set up our project.

To get started, you will need to have Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) installed on your machine. You can download and install them from the official Node.js website.

Once you have Node.js and npm installed, open up your terminal and create a new directory for your project. Navigate to the directory and run the following command to initialize a new Node.js project:

npm init -y

This command will create a new `package.json` file in your project directory. The `package.json` file is used to manage the dependencies and scripts for your project.

Next, we need to install Express.js and Mongoose. Run the following commands in your terminal:

npm install express
npm install mongooseba

These commands will install Express.js and Mongoose as dependencies for your project.

Now that we have our project set up, let’s move on to creating our API. In the next part of this tutorial, we will create a basic server using Express.js and connect it to a MongoDB database using Mongoose.