Building a Backend with MongoDB, Express, and Node

During the development of most web applications, there are common tasks, basic features, and implementation code repeated across the process. The same is true for the MERN applications developed in this book. Taking these similarities into consideration, we will first lay the foundations for a skeleton MERN application that can be easily modified and extended to implement a variety of MERN applications.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics and start with the backend implementation of the MERN skeleton, using Node, Express, and MongoDB:

• User CRUD and auth in a MERN application
• Handling HTTP requests with an Express server
• Using a Mongoose schema for a user model
• APIs for user CRUD and auth
• Auth with JWT for protected routes
• Running backend code and checking APIs

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