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JavaScript CRUD Rest API using Nodejs, Express, Sequelize, Postgres, Docker and Docker Compose

Francesco Ciulla on February 12, 2023

Let's create a CRUD rest API in JavaScript, using: Node.js Express Sequelize Postgres Docker Docker Compose All the code is available in th...

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Anton Fridlund • Feb 16 '23

Hello!
I think this read was quite interesting, good guide.

There were however a few things i noticed that I don't often see in modern JavaScript programming.

Usually you would avoid chaining calls with ".then" since it is bad practice, use "await" instead. Is there a reason why you chain your calls like this even when it's bad practice?

Exporting arrow functions in the controller leads to poor readability and is also not a common way to handle controllers. You would probably want to create a class that represents the controller and export that class. Do you have a reason for exporting arrow functions?

Something that I was wondering throughout the guide was why you use "require" instead of "import", basically why commonjs instead of esm? Commonjs is since long dying and i would not recommend using it.

The JavaScript code in the guide seems to be quite old and I would be careful if I were to use it.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

nice breakdown Anton! this is not optimized and it's meant to get things fast. the focus here was more on creating the endpoints and the docker image and the connection with the db.

about the async await, I just used the suggested code, but in other guides I used the await, honestly I prefer that one

this is not meant to be a production ready code, but it's a way to undesrtand the basics!

Thanks for your feedback, I will probably level up the code in the next guide!

Anton Fridlund • Feb 16 '23

Thank you for the explanation!
I was happy to see such a thorough guide as a whole.

It was interesting to see how you containerize the application and I also liked the testing of the end product using Postman and TablePlus, great tools.

Thank you for the guide!

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

my idea was to start with this and maybe focus more on the upcoming Typescript example. this article is a breakthrough of something I coded live on youtube.

Thank yuo for your feedback, highly appreciated instead of the usual "asweome" comment! 💙

Karl Krasnowsky • Feb 16 '23

A typescript version would be great! Thanks for your effort.
Awesome! 😄

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

it's on the todo list. thanks

Edward Fernando • Feb 17 '23

Thanks for this tutorial @francescoxx

When I run this on my machine, although the server is started, it is stuck when calling the endpoint. It does not returning the response.

Im currently using mac with m1 chip. Any pointers about this?

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 17 '23

try docker ps -a. can you see the containers up and running?

Edward Fernando • Feb 17 '23 • Edited

Oh, this is because i missed the next() function call.

app.use((req, res, next) => {
    res.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*');
    res.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET, POST, PUT, DELETE');
    next();
});

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 18 '23

oh I see! glad you fixed it

Edward Fernando • Feb 17 '23

➜  ~ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED        STATUS          PORTS                              NAMES
d3f626718969   efs/node_live_app   "docker-entrypoint.s…"   15 hours ago   Up 39 seconds   3000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:3333->3333/tcp   node_app
3c423213aeff   postgres:12         "docker-entrypoint.s…"   15 hours ago   Up 15 hours     0.0.0.0:5432->5432/tcp             node_db

It is actually running

Edward Fernando • Feb 17 '23

in the index.js, i tried to commented out these lines and it is working now:

// app.use((req, res, next) => {
//     res.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*');
//     res.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET, POST, PUT, DELETE');
// });

I still don't understand what happened. Any pointers / explanation would be appreciated much.

Hisham Akmal • Feb 18 '23

Well written and documented. Thanks a ton! But i've got one doubt regarding docker compose and docker build. Arent we supposed to build the image first and name it node_live_app using the docker build command and then execute docker compose build?

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 18 '23

no, docker compose build just builds the image. you can even just run docker compose up --build , or docker compose up.

I just did it to show the step-by-step commands to make it clearer

Hisham Akmal • Feb 23 '23

Oh okay. Thank you!

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 24 '23

you are welcome

Mude Shoban Babu • Apr 18 '23

Thanks so much for detailed course. Just a correction in link,

The youtube link that you have kept in the bottom of the course content takes to "Build a CRUD Rest API with Kotlin, Postgres, Docker and docker compose" instead of "JavaScript CRUD Rest API using Nodejs, Express, Sequelize, Postgres, Docker and Docker Compose", it should be updated to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv-jMWV29rU&t=236s

Francesco Ciulla • Apr 18 '23

fixed, thanks!

Mude Shoban Babu • Apr 18 '23

Thank you Francesco.

Francesco Ciulla • Apr 18 '23

you are welcome Mude

Bobby Iliev • Feb 13 '23

Great post!

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 13 '23

thanks Bobby!

Charles Robertson • Feb 15 '23

This is a first class tutorial. Very clear and precise.
I’ve been a server side Dev for nearly 20 years, using a language called Coldfusion. In Coldfusion we have a tag called CFQUERY, which we can write SQL, inside.
So, for example:

<cfquery name="getEmployees" datasource="cfdocexamples">
 SELECT FIRSTNAME,LASTNAME,EMAIL,PHONE
 FROM EMPLOYEES
</cfquery>

Obviously, you can write extremely complex SQL queries here.
I have only been using NodeJs for a few years now and have always wondered how easy it is to increase the complexity of the SQL query in a NodeJS Rest API application?

CRUD is all very well and is great for highlighting the basics, but, in the real world, business requirements might warrant more complexity?

Charles Robertson • Feb 24 '23

Hi Francesco

I have set up a codesandbox VM, to try and emulate this tutorial.

I see that your table is called:

Users

But you connect via:

const User = define("user", {
  id: {
    type: INTEGER,
    autoIncrement: true,
    allowNull: false,
    primaryKey: true,
  },
  name: STRING,
  email: STRING,
});

How does your code find the Users table?

KayBeckmann • Feb 13 '23

I am new at coding. Will try it on the weekend. Thank you for this tutorial.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 13 '23

please let me know if it worked. thank you

KayBeckmann • Mar 2 '23

Finaly I tested it today.
It worked very well.
a little spelling mistakes in "docker-compose" for starting the second container, but this was easy to fix.
now I can make a little backend for testing in local network :D
Thank you so much.

Francesco Ciulla • May 8 '23

amazing, glad it helped. do you mean a spelling mistake on your end or in the tutorial?

Christophe Avonture • Feb 15 '23

A few weeks ago, I've discover postgrest, just crazy easy. postgrest.org/en/stable/index.html

It's also open data, directly query your postgresql db just using URIs.

Toul • Feb 12 '23

Nice write up! If I ever use this stack I’ll be sure to keep this article nearby.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 12 '23

thank you Toul!

ebuka anthony • Feb 18 '23

nice article, i learnt a lot, u keep inspiring me fran

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 18 '23

thank you Ebuka!

ebuka anthony • Feb 19 '23

you're welcome, now let me use your tutorial article & practicccccccccccccce

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 19 '23

good luccccccck

Farhana Binte Hasan • Feb 16 '23

Will use this one day. Thanks for sharing and making a detailed article.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

you are welcome

Odeyale Kehinde Musiliudeen • Feb 16 '23

Welldone Boss

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

you are welcome

⚡Abiola⚡ • Feb 16 '23

This is beautiful. Never tried Postgres with Node and Express, before, but this is surely gonna help. Thanks.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

you are welcome!

Ivan Karabadzhak • Feb 16 '23

Nice post 👍

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

you are welcome

lbino97 • Feb 16 '23

Amei o post

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

🔥

Ashish Binu • Feb 16 '23

Awesome ! <3

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

thank you

Nerando Johnson • Feb 15 '23

Time to use this for an idea I have....

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 15 '23

good luck

Abdulsalaam Noibi • Feb 14 '23

WOW,What a great knowledge you have shared Francesco.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 14 '23

thank you @noibisdev

Lotfi Jebali • Feb 13 '23

Thanks for sharing, well explained and documented 😁

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 14 '23

thank you @Lotfij

Code of Relevancy • Feb 14 '23

A great resource for anyone looking to build a CRUD API..

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 14 '23

thank you @codeofrelevancy !!

sborowski • Feb 13 '23

Great post. It's been long since I last used express and sequelize.
Too bad there's no validation for incoming data.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 13 '23

indeed. there are probably other ways to validate input tho and I should double check

Tra Le • Feb 13 '23

Something missin... hmm, maybe that's typescript i guess

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 13 '23

ye probably

Pradumna Saraf • Feb 12 '23

Great blog

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 12 '23

Pradumna the best!

Yan • Feb 16 '23

Thanks a lot !

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

you are welcome

Rafael Freitas • Feb 16 '23

Amazing! Thank you for the post.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 16 '23

you are welcome Rafael

Alex smith • Feb 14 '23

fantastic post Francesco, what excellent details you have offered.
I'm grateful.

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 14 '23

you are welcome Alex!

Danilo Marroco • Feb 14 '23

Great post, thanks for sharing!

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 14 '23

Thank you Danilo, highly appreciated!

Panagiotis Spanos • Feb 18 '23

Hello Francesco,
i really enjoyed the tutorial but i am stuck in the tableplus step. When i connect with the node_live_db its not empty

Any ideas why that happened?

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 18 '23

interesting, can you try to remove the volume and try again? of course be careful if you are ona production environment!!

Panagiotis Spanos • Feb 18 '23 • Edited

Still the same, i first stopped the container and deleted the volume and recreated it and second try i stopped the container and i changed the docker-compose.yml file volumes part with
volumes:
# node_db_data: {} # remove the old volume
data: {} # create a new volume

to maybe create a new db folder, but both tries it was not empty.

I also installed psql to check the db and i get that "i did not find any relations" when i typed \dt

Francesco Ciulla • Feb 19 '23

try to copy past my docker compose and try agaqin