In this beginner-level walkthrough, I tidy up a Node/Express app whose server.js has grown unwieldy by moving routes into separate files with Express Router. I show how to mount routers as middleware with app.use, note that a routes folder is a common convention, and highlight the gotcha that the mounted path prefix gets stripped from the request URL. A consistent naming convention for route groups makes the split easier, and sample code is available on GitHub...
A beginner-friendly walkthrough of enabling file uploads in a Node/Express web app using the multer middleware. I cover setting up a basic Express server, configuring multer’s disk storage, and submitting files via an HTML form with multipart/form-data encoding, before briefly noting production concerns like sanitizing filenames and restricting file size and type...
I walk through building user authentication in an Express.js app from the ground up, starting with how HTTP requests, cookies, and sessions work before moving to session IDs and the express-session library. I then cover a login flow with bcrypt-hashed passwords and file-based session persistence, laying groundwork for a future post that will use Passport.js...
I walk through protecting a Node/Express app with nginx basic auth, aimed at simple utilities on public servers: firewall off the app’s port so only nginx can reach it, configure nginx to proxy requests and require htpasswd credentials, and pass the authenticated username to the app via a request header. I also cover the approach’s limitations, such as plaintext passwords without SSL, no logout mechanism, and no brute-force protection...
In this walkthrough, I build a minimal Node/Express REST API backed by SQLite as a learning exercise for migrating an app away from Mongoose. I cover query strings versus request bodies, CRUD endpoints for a users table, and rewriting string-interpolated SQL as parameterized queries to prevent injection. I close with a table of REST conventions for HTTP methods and a link to the finished project on GitHub...
This is a write-up of a small weekend project of mine: a Node.js/Express server that serves markdown files from a directory as HTML, using middleware to intercept requests for .md files and convert them with the Showdown library. I added a simple string-replacement template so the output is well-formed HTML with a proper page title. The code is on GitHub, with hardening and a possible Docker containerization left as future work...
In this beginner-level walkthrough, I move a static temperature text file from NGINX to a Node.js server. I introduce NGINX and reverse proxying, explain what Node and Express are, and show a short Express setup that serves the file on localhost port 3000, with deploying it left for later...
A short YouTube video on building REST APIs with Node and Express prompts a plan to replace my existing weather data setup—a Python cron job on a VPS that writes API results to a text file served by NGINX—with a Node.js endpoint that fetches and caches fresh weather data on request. This would cut the up-to-ten-minute staleness of temperature data polled by homelab servers, and I break the work into small steps, starting with replicating the current text-file behaviour in Node behind NGINX...
