README.md

be-assessment-2

Production ready express setup.

Content

• 🏗 Architecture
• 🔐 Security
• 🔁 Sessions
• ⬆️ Uploads
• 👩‍💻 Install
• ⚖️ Licence

🏗 Architecture

Architecture is done as modular as possible, server.js only serves as a high-level overview as it passes further middleware setup to lib/ and requests to distinguished routers in routes/.

be-assessment-2/
├─ lib/
├─ models/
├─ node_modules/
├─ routes/
├─ static/
│  └─ img/
│  └─ ...
├─ view/
│  └─ partials/
│  └─ ...
├─ .env
├─ package.json
├─ README.md
├─ server.js
└─ ...

🔐 Security

Passport

Simple, unobtrusive authentication

Helmet

Secure Express apps by setting various HTTP headers.

🔁 Sessions

User can stay logged in through express-session. Additionally, when the server restarts the sessions stay in place because they are saved in MongoDB with connect-mongo, as can be seen by the store property below.

// ...
.use(
  session({
    secret: process.env.SESSION_SECRET,
    resave: false,
    saveUninitialized: false,
    store: new MongoStore({ mongooseConnection: mongoose.connection })
  })
)
// ...

The process.env.SESSION_SECRET is a 64 character crypto string.

⬆️ Uploads

File uploads are done with multer with custom settings to generate unique file names with shortid. How unique are pseudo-random generators you may ask? According to this answer on Stackoverflow we're pretty safe:

While shortid's are not guaranteed to be unique, the likelihood of a collision is extremely small. Unless you generate billions of entries per year, you could safely assume that a collision will never happen.

Custom settings for multer:

const storage = multer.diskStorage({
  destination: (req, file, cb) => cb(null, 'static/img'),
  filename: (req, { originalname }, cb) =>
    cb(null, shortid.generate() + path.extname(originalname))
})

‍💻 Install

1. Get a MongoDB database, either locally or online.

• Local recommendation: Kitematic.
• Online recommendation: MLab

2. Get this repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/Murderlon/be-assessment-2.git

3. Install dependencies.

$ yarn

or

$ npm install

4. Create your .env file (and fill in the empty variables).

$ echo 'DB_URL=
  SESSION_SECRET=' > .env

5. Run it.

yarn start

or

npm start

That's it!

⚖️ Licence

MIT © Merlijn Vos.