Creating a REST API in Node.js with Express, Typescript, MongoDB and Docker — Part 1

How to create a RESTful PokeAPI in Node.js

This is part one of a series of articles which will show you how to create a REST API in Node.js, using Express, TypeScript, Docker and MongoDB. Here are the remaining parts of this series:

Creating a REST API in Node.js with Express, Typescript, MongoDB and Docker — Part 2

Creating a REST API in Node.js with Express, Typescript, MongoDB and Docker — Part 3

You can find the full code here.

Introduction

In this series, we will be learning how to create our own RESTful API in Node.js using an excellent web framework named Express. However, before we start, a little theory:

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. An awesome style of software architecture designed by Roy Fielding for his doctoral dissertation. REST allows us to design loosely coupled applications by using the HTTP protocol.

HTTP provides us with the following verbs, or methods: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, which correspond to Read, Create, Update and Delete (CRUD operations) respectively. There are a few other verbs, but they aren’t used as frequently. We will be using these…