Setting up fastify

Before we dive into creating POST and GET routes, let's set up Fastify in a new Node.js project. Ensure you have Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) installed on your machine, and follow these steps:

Initialize a new Node.js project:

$ mkdir fastify-app
$ cd fastify-app
$ npm init -y

Install Fastify:

$ npm install fastify --save

Creating a Basic Fastify Server:

Once Fastify is installed, let's create a basic server configuration to handle HTTP requests. Create an index.js file in your project directory and add the following code:

// index.js
const fastify = require('fastify')();

fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => {
  return { message: 'Welcome to my Fastify app!' };
});

fastify.post('/user', async (request, reply) => {
  const { name, email } = request.body;
  return { message: `Hello ${name} (${email})!` };
});

fastify.listen({ port: 3000 }, (err) => {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err);
    process.exit(1);
  }
  console.log('Server is running on port 3000');
});

In the code snippet above, we created two routes: a GET route ("/") and a POST route ("/user"). The GET route simply returns a welcome message, while the POST route expects a JSON payload containing user data. You can customize these routes according to your application's requirements.

Let's run our server with:

$ node index.js

and give it a try by running curl:

$ curl http://localhost:3000
{"message":"Welcome to my Fastify app!"}

or let's post a JSON object to out /user route:

$ curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost:3000/user' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "email": "user@example.com",
    "name": "Foo"
}'
{"message":"Hello Foo (user@example.com)!"}

As you can see, it is quite easy and effective to create a Web backend server with node.js and fastify!

In the next post we will take a look at validating the input and output data with JSON schema.

Stay fast!