Getting MEAN with Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node

Chapter 6. Writing a REST API: Exposing the MongoDB database to the application

This chapter covers

• Rules of REST APIs
• API patterns
• Typical CRUD functions (create, read, update, delete)
• Using Express and Mongoose to interact with MongoDB
• Testing API endpoints

As we come in to this chapter we have a MongoDB database set up, but we can only interact with it through the MongoDB shell. During this chapter we’ll build a REST API so that we can interact with our database through HTTP calls and perform the common CRUD functions: create, read, update, and delete.

We’ll mainly be working with Node and Express, using Mongoose to help with the interactions. Figure 6.1 shows where this chapter fits into the overall architecture.

Figure 6.1.