This repository demostrates making a simple REST API with Express and Node. It includes authorization, authentication functionality with Firebase as well as the ability to cache results into Redis after reading from a local MongoDB instance.

Instead of using a database and hosting it online, we use local data for users.

Interacting with the POST, PUT and DELETE commands will change the contents of the file.

To setup after cloning, run npm install to install all necessary packages.

Once done, run the node server using npm start.

It is automatically configured to run on PORT 8080.

Alternatively, the API is hosted on Google Cloud, and can be accessed using this link.

For testing our API, we use the dependencies mocha, chai and chai-http.

To run the unit tests, run npm test.

For Authorization and Authentication:

Our API supports two types of users, viewers, logged in viewers and admins.

Normal viewers are not authenticated, that is to say, they can only view the bare minimum.

To see what a normal viewer can access, refer to userRouter.

Logged in users can get access to extra data as they are authenticated users. To authenticate a user, you would have to login with an email and a password.

However, logged in users may not be authorized to all data, and some data are protected only for those with an 'admin' role.

To see what a logged in user and admin can access, refer to adminRouter. We provide authentication and authroization checks in middleware.

For Redis caching:

We are reading data from a local MongoDB database instance. It has 500 records inside.

To prevent our server from repeatedly querying this endpoint, we cache the result into our Redis cache with a current TTL of 30s.

When querying data, take note of the key fromCache in our JSON response, as having it to true means that we are reading from cache while having it to false means that we are reading from the database itself.