Building An HTTP Server

Build a web server is one of the most common parts of a JavaScript developer's "Full-Stack" arsenal.
Serving http json payloads for APIs (rest, graphQL, etc)

Building An HTTP Server

Just Node, No Dependencies

The node docs have great examples of how to go about starting http server work.
The basic http server looks something like...

// import the node module
const http = require('node:http');

// choose a port to listen on
const PORT = process.env.API_PORT || 3000;

// build the server
// here, only returning a "hello world!" string to the requester
http
  .createServer((req, res) => {
    res.write('hello world!\n');
    res.end();
  })
  .listen(PORT);

Key details here:

http or node:http is the built-into-node http server library

Leveraging Express

create a directory to hold the project
run in the directory, run npm init -y to initial the repo as a module: for this use case, and many rest api use-cases, the package.json is not explicitly to create a new module- rather to leverage dependencies
add express to the dependencies with npm i express
fill an index.js file with something like...

const e = require('express');

// constants
const expressObj = e();
const port = 3000;
const HELLO_STRING = 'Hello from the express server!'
const ROOT_ROUTE = '/'


function helloHandler(req, res){
  return res.send(HELLO_STRING)
}

// register a "handler" to listen at endpoint "/"
expressObj.get(ROOT_ROUTE, helloHandler)

// start server, register listener callback
expressObj.listen(port, serverListeningCallback)

Leveraging Fastify

A Trivial server in fastify can look nearly identical to the trivial example in express:

const fastify = require('fastify');

const HELLO_STRING = 'Hello from the fastify server!';
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;
const ROOT_ROUTE = '/'
function helloHandler(req, res) {
  return res.send(HELLO_STRING);
}

const app = fastify();

function listenCallback(err, address){
  if (err) {
    console.error(err);
    process.exit(1);
  }
  console.log(`Server listening on ${address}`);
}

app.get(ROOT_ROUTE, helloHandler);

// Start the server
app.listen({ port: PORT }, listenCallback);

Tags:

server