Developing a REST API

Let's plan our first REST API. With Express, it is very easy and the development itself does not really differ from website development.

Here is a summary of what we want to implement as a REST API:

Resource (URI)	POST (create)	GET (read)	PUT (update)	DELETE (destroy)
/pictures	Create new picture	List pictures	N/A (update all)	N/A (destroy all)
/pictures/1	Error	Show picture ID 1	Update picture ID 1	Destroy picture ID 1

• The format is JSON
• Bulk updates and bulk destroys are not safe, so we will not implement those
• POST, GET, PUT, DELETE equals to CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE, with the abbreviation CRUD

Using Express

Building a REST API is pretty popular in the Node.js community. There are a lot of different ways to handle such a task. There are even ready-to-use modules such as rest.js or restify. However, we will use another framework called Express.

Tip

Express is a web application framework for Node.js. With Express, we can build websites as well...