Building a REST API

Now that we have a basic understanding of Express, let’s build a REST API for the microblogging platform. We will start with the basic CRUD operations and then we will add more features.

In Chapter 9, we learned about the principles of building RESTful APIs. We will apply them now. As the platform is called “whispering” and the users will be able to create, read, update, and delete whispers, we will have the following endpoints:

• GET /api/v1/whisper: Get all the whispers
• GET /api/v1/whisper/:id: Get a whisper by ID
• POST /api/v1/whisper: Create a new whisper
• PUT /api/v1/whisper/:id: Update a whisper by ID
• DELETE /api/v1/whisper/:id: Delete a whisper by ID

In this case, we used the prefix /api/v1/ because we are building the first version of the API. It is a good practice to version the API in the URL because, in the future, you may want to introduce breaking changes, and it will be hard for your consumers to adapt...