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...
After Insomnia forced account creation and my saved API requests disappeared, I switched to Bruno, a free and open-source API client available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI and VS Code plugins. Bruno stores request collections as human-readable text files, making them easy to commit to source control alongside code. The writeup includes my first impressions after an afternoon of use...
A small Go utility exposes a lightweight JSON endpoint on each node or VM indicating whether RAM and disk usage are okay. Uptime Kuma watches the endpoint with its HTTP keyword check and sends an ntfy push notification when a machine gets into trouble. I include brief impressions of writing in Go and link to the GitHub repo...
I deploy a small Node.js and Express service from my MacBook to an Ubuntu VPS, covering the choice between a native install and a Docker container, installing Node and npm via apt (including why the Ubuntu repository version is quite old), and copying project files to the server with scp rather than setting up git-based CI/CD for such a tiny project. I test with Insomnia instead of Postman, which I avoid because of its data collection...
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...
