Production-API

A TypeScript Express REST API focused on user authentication, session management, and product resource handling. The codebase includes validation, structured logging, metrics, and a Docker-ready build pipeline.

About The Project

Production-API is a maintainable API template demonstrating secure authentication flows, session handling, and resource ownership checks while remaining easy to extend and test. It covers JWT-based authentication, persistent sessions, a full product resource workflow, and production-readiness concerns like validation, logging, and metrics.

Key Features

• JSON Web Token authentication with access token and refresh token
• Persistent session management stored in MongoDB
• Product create, read, update, delete workflow with ownership checks
• Request validation using Zod schemas
• Structured logging with Pino and readable output via pino-pretty
• Lightweight metrics server exposing Prometheus-compatible metrics
• Development scripts with fast restart and TypeScript compile step
• Containerized build and run via Dockerfile

Development Progress

Overall Progress100% (Complete)

Core features implemented and build pipeline configured. Ready for production deployment after environment verification and secrets configuration.

Technology Stack

• Node.js
• TypeScript
• Express.js
• MongoDB
• Jest
• Docker

Motivation

Build a maintainable API template that demonstrates secure authentication flows, session handling, and resource ownership checks while remaining easy to extend and test.

• Provide a clear authentication pattern using JWT and server-side sessions
• Offer a small but complete product resource example with authorization checks
• Demonstrate best practices for validation, logging, and metrics
• Make the project easy to run locally and in a container

Development Journey

1. Initialized the TypeScript project and added Express with modular routing.
2. Implemented the user model and secure password handling.
3. Added session persistence and token signing utilities.
4. Built product resource handlers with ownership validation.
5. Added logging, metrics, and test scaffolding.

Problems Faced

1. Token Management : Designing a safe refresh token flow while keeping session persistence simple and auditable.

2. Request Validation : Ensuring validation is comprehensive but does not cause request hangs when payload fields are missing.

3. Performance Versus Safety : Balancing higher password hashing factors with acceptable development iteration times.

4. Environment Complexity : Managing RSA key material and database credentials in a way that supports local development and container deployment.

Key Learnings

1. Separation of Concerns : Keeping controllers, services, and utilities separate simplifies testing and future extension.

2. Defensive Validation : Using a typed validation layer prevents a class of runtime errors and improves API contract clarity.

3. Observability : Adding logging and metrics early makes debugging and capacity planning far easier.

4. Deployment Parity : A reproducible Docker build plus clear environment expectations reduces surprises when moving between environments.