Build a web server using only vanilla Node without any 3rd party packages or libraries
I started learning how to work with pure Node web server (without Express or any other packages) The best way to solidify the learning is to build something with the knowledge. However, with the limited scope of the lesson, I couldn’t find a project to build.
I’m playing Fruit Ninja these days. After every round, it shows interesting fruit facts. I got an idea to make an API which will display random fruit facts in JSON format. This way I can put my knowledge to use while building something fun.
I built this simple API which shows interesting fruit facts in JSON format. When you type in localhost:3000/apple or any other available fruits, it will spit out this data.
The API is simple yet sophisticated. This is the first time I’m building a URL slug which acts as a variable. It’s the same as /:fruit in express.js.
I suggest you open up the code and follow along with this post.
The idea is to take the full URL http://localhost:3000/mango and split it into parts. Then I take the path /mango and strip out any slashes to get a final clean trimmed path mango after which I can match the slug against my route handlers. I learned this way doing it from Pirple’s Node Masterclass course.
I collected these fruit facts from a wiki page. I will write about how I scrapped those facts with JavaScript in another post.
I create an array of available fruits. Many fruits have more than one fact so I created an object of fruits with an array of facts for every fruit:
Other than the fruit facts, the API also has 3 additional pages — the homepage, a not found page, and a help page. First I check if the given URL slug is a matching fruit. If it’s a matching fruit, it will serve the fruit handler with the given fruit. If it doesn’t include a matching fruit but matches the other handlers, it will serve them accordingly:
Then all is left to do is to call the chosenHandler function and pass in the callback function:
We use the native http package to create a web server. The server is built using http.createServer. The createServer function takes a callback where we can handle requests and serve fruit facts or other pages from chosenHandler. We then listen to port 3000 using server.listen.
const server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
/* Callback to handle requests with chosenHandler */
}
server.listen(3000, () => { console.log('Server started') })
You can tinker with the code on my Github page. I suggest you install the JSON viewer extension to see the JSON in a nice formatted way.
If you enjoyed this article you can check out my blog for more Node JS related posts.
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