accelerated.api

Accelerated

After deploying countless number of NodeJS Express engine apps, I've grown tired of writing the same boilerplate. Even more, NPM is a fantastic way to manage depdencies and reusable code, but everything out there claiming to the silver bullet for app and api development, never fully acknowledge that successful services and software require scalable and well-separated codebases.

I've designed and open-sourced Accelerated to be an easy way to create scalable applications, while still maintaining that much-needed transparency in application development. This isn't a black box. This is a bunch of similar patterned CommonJS modules, working together to save your time and energy, so you can skip the boilerplate and build your damn app -- but in a scalable and truly maintainable way.

Think of this as how certain gems are to ruby. Ruby developers can easily spin seamless and time-tested API's with almost no effort. Well, this is what Accelerated is meant to be for NodeJS. Node is still maturing, but that comes with its loyal developers maturing, and I hope this is a shining example of just that.

npm install accelerated.api --save

App vs. Network env.json

There are two ways anyone can load the env.json file, one relative to the particular express app, and one relative to the entire network.

Here's an example. Let's say that your entire service relies on a network that involves 3 different machines working together. It'd be hard to keep up with 3 different env.json files. Instead, you can declare each machine's env.json by having a network env.json file.

The network env.json is declared differently, but it's intuitive. Here's how the network env.json file would look:

{
	"api": {},
	"queue": {},
	"worker": {}
}

Note on Network env.json

The keys are directly referencing the folder names, and so this really only makes sense when using locally. At that point, make sure you take the pains to separately spin up the different resources in production, and appropriately lock down each resource.

Note on env.json

Since all variables in env.json are being loaded directly into process.env, just remember that you won't be able to use any nested variables! In other words, you're persisting non-objects into process.env. The easiest way to organize your environment variables to an extreme amount of detail, is prefixing your variables keys.

Logging

By default, Accelerated comes with a built-in logging mechanism, giving you the ease and functionality needed to keep your application honest.

Easiest way to get started, is by configuring these env.json parameters, which are completely optional:

//Enable logging to your console
"API_LOG_CONSOLE": true | false

//Enable logging to /logs/api.log
"API_LOG_FILE": true | false

//Set the desired level of logging
"API_LOG_LEVEL": "ALL | TRACE | DEBUG | INFO | WARN | ERROR | FATAL | OFF"

//Can modify log formatting for Express level logging
"API_LOG_EXPRESS_FORMAT": "[:status] [:method] :url"

Using Logging

• Call app.get('logger') to get access to your Accelerated logger object
• Call any of the following logger methods to display your message:

var logger = app.get('logger');
logger.trace('Entering route');
logger.debug('Received parameters');
logger.info('All parameters have been accounted for');
logger.warn('One parameter fails criteria');
logger.error('Parameters are wrong');
logger.fatal('Must retry request');

Example

Visit https://github.com/haseebnqureshi/accelerated.api.example for the easiest and quickest way to get going.