node

Deploying Node.js Apps to AWS EC2 with Docker

Once you've written a web application, there are dozens of offerings to get your app online and usable by other people. One well known offering is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform - Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is a core part of AWS, and a lot of...

Executing Shell Commands with Node.js

System administrators and developers frequently turn to automation to reduce their workload and improve their processes. When working with servers, automated tasks are frequently scripted with shell scripts. However, a developer might prefer to use a more general higher-level language for complex tasks. Many applications also need to interact with...

Handling Authentication in Express.js

In this article, we are going to make a simple app to demonstrate how you can handle authentication in Express.js. Since we will be using some basic ES6 syntaxes and the Bootstrap framework for UI design, it might help if you have some basic knowledge about those technologies. Even...

Publishing and Subscribing to AWS SNS Messages with Node.js

A lot of technology that we see relies on a very immediate request/response cycle - when you make a request to a website, you get a response containing the website you requested, ideally immediately. This all relies on the user making the active decision to request that data. Sometimes,...

Sorting Arrays in JavaScript

Like many other popular languages, JavaScript conveniently comes with a built-in method for sorting arrays. While the end result is the same, the various JavaScript engines implement this method using different sort algorithms: V8: Quicksort or Insertion Sort (for smaller arrays) Firefox: Merge sort Safari: Quicksort, Merge Sort, or Selection...

Message Queueing in Node.js with AWS SQS

With the increased complexity of modern software systems, came along the need to break up systems that had outgrown their initial size. This increase in the complexity of systems made it harder to maintain, update, and upgrade them. This paved the way for microservices that allowed massive monolithic systems to...

Deploying a Node.js App to a DigitalOcean Droplet with Docker

Get HTTP POST Body in Express.js

In this brief article we'll be going over how to extract information from a POST body in Express.js. The HTTP protocol provides a number of ways to pass information from a client to a server, with POST bodies being the most flexible and most commonly used method to send...

Reading and Writing YAML to a File in Node.js/JavaScript

In the last few years YAML, which stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language, has become very popular for use in storing data in a serialized manner, typically configuration files. Since YAML essentially is a data format, the YAML specification is fairly brief. Thus, the only functionality required of YAML libraries...