Table of Contents for
Node.js 8 the Right Way

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Node.js 8 the Right Way by Jim Wilson Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2018
  1. Title Page
  2. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  3. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  4. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  5. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  6.  Acknowledgments
  7.  Preface
  8. Why Node.js the Right Way?
  9. What’s in This Book
  10. What This Book Is Not
  11. Code Examples and Conventions
  12. Online Resources
  13. Part I. Getting Up to Speed on Node.js 8
  14. 1. Getting Started
  15. Thinking Beyond the web
  16. Node.js’s Niche
  17. How Node.js Applications Work
  18. Aspects of Node.js Development
  19. Installing Node.js
  20. 2. Wrangling the File System
  21. Programming for the Node.js Event Loop
  22. Spawning a Child Process
  23. Capturing Data from an EventEmitter
  24. Reading and Writing Files Asynchronously
  25. The Two Phases of a Node.js Program
  26. Wrapping Up
  27. 3. Networking with Sockets
  28. Listening for Socket Connections
  29. Implementing a Messaging Protocol
  30. Creating Socket Client Connections
  31. Testing Network Application Functionality
  32. Extending Core Classes in Custom Modules
  33. Developing Unit Tests with Mocha
  34. Wrapping Up
  35. 4. Connecting Robust Microservices
  36. Installing ØMQ
  37. Publishing and Subscribing to Messages
  38. Responding to Requests
  39. Routing and Dealing Messages
  40. Clustering Node.js Processes
  41. Pushing and Pulling Messages
  42. Wrapping Up
  43. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  44. Part II. Working with Data
  45. 5. Transforming Data and Testing Continuously
  46. Procuring External Data
  47. Behavior-Driven Development with Mocha and Chai
  48. Extracting Data from XML with Cheerio
  49. Processing Data Files Sequentially
  50. Debugging Tests with Chrome DevTools
  51. Wrapping Up
  52. 6. Commanding Databases
  53. Introducing Elasticsearch
  54. Creating a Command-Line Program in Node.js with Commander
  55. Using request to Fetch JSON over HTTP
  56. Shaping JSON with jq
  57. Inserting Elasticsearch Documents in Bulk
  58. Implementing an Elasticsearch Query Command
  59. Wrapping Up
  60. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  61. Part III. Creating an Application from the Ground Up
  62. 7. Developing RESTful Web Services
  63. Advantages of Express
  64. Serving APIs with Express
  65. Writing Modular Express Services
  66. Keeping Services Running with nodemon
  67. Adding Search APIs
  68. Simplifying Code Flows with Promises
  69. Manipulating Documents RESTfully
  70. Emulating Synchronous Style with async and await
  71. Providing an Async Handler Function to Express
  72. Wrapping Up
  73. 8. Creating a Beautiful User Experience
  74. Getting Started with webpack
  75. Generating Your First webpack Bundle
  76. Sprucing Up Your UI with Bootstrap
  77. Bringing in Bootstrap JavaScript and jQuery
  78. Transpiling with TypeScript
  79. Templating HTML with Handlebars
  80. Implementing hashChange Navigation
  81. Listing Objects in a View
  82. Saving Data with a Form
  83. Wrapping Up
  84. 9. Fortifying Your Application
  85. Setting Up the Initial Project
  86. Managing User Sessions in Express
  87. Adding Authentication UI Elements
  88. Setting Up Passport
  89. Authenticating with Facebook, Twitter, and Google
  90. Composing an Express Router
  91. Bringing in the Book Bundle UI
  92. Serving in Production
  93. Wrapping Up
  94. Node.js 8 the Right Way
  95. 10. BONUS: Developing Flows with Node-RED
  96. Setting Up Node-RED
  97. Securing Node-RED
  98. Developing a Node-RED Flow
  99. Creating HTTP APIs with Node-RED
  100. Handling Errors in Node-RED Flows
  101. Wrapping Up
  102. A1. Setting Up Angular
  103. A2. Setting Up React
  104. Node.js 8 the Right Way

Introducing Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed, document-oriented, NoSQL database. In recent years, Elasticsearch has been gaining in popularity relative to other JSON-based document datastores, and for good reason. Built on Apache Lucene,[47] Elasticsearch provides a rich suite of querying capabilities, including full-text search, stemming, and fuzzy search. With Elasticsearch you can also execute a variety of aggregation queries, apply filters, and perform numeric comparisons.

No one tool is best for all jobs, of course, and Elasticsearch is no exception. But given that our Project Gutenberg documents are textual in nature—including titles of books, author names, and subject strings—Elasticsearch is a natural fit. Once the documents are stored in Elasticsearch, we’ll be able to develop our own specific RESTful APIs on top, starting in the next chapter.

The scalability and reliability of Elasticsearch comes from its clustered architecture. By sharding indices and replicating the shards, an Elasticsearch cluster guards against outages and can often parallelize the execution of queries. Proper configuring and tuning of an Elasticsearch cluster are huge topics, and are outside the scope of this book. Fortunately, the default configuration settings are sufficient for our exploratory use case.

As for interacting with Elasticsearch, it’s all about making proper HTTP requests. Doing this will give us the opportunity to talk about HTTP and RESTful practices—information that will be handy in Chapter 7, ​Developing RESTful Web Services​, when we’ll implement our own RESTful web services on top of Elasticsearch. And the techniques you’ll use here apply to any other RESTful APIs you use with Node.js, as well.

Of course, to do anything with Elasticsearch, you’ll need to install it. Let’s do that now.

Installing Prerequisites

Elasticsearch is built on Java 8, which means you’ll need to install a Java Runtime Environment if you haven’t already. For production use, Elastic recommends using Oracle’s Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.8.0_73 or higher. Instructions on how to install Java 8 are available on Oracle’s website.[48]

You can run java -version from the command line to confirm that Java is installed and ready.

​ ​$ ​​java​​ ​​-version​
​ openjdk version "1.8.0_91"
​ OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_91-8u91-b14-3ubuntu1~16.04.1-b14)
​ OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.91-b14, mixed mode)

Once you have Java installed, it’s time to download and install Elasticsearch.

Installing Elasticsearch

We’ll be using version 5.2 of Elasticsearch, available from Elastic’s download page.[49] Once you download the archive, unzip it and run bin/elasticsearch from the command line. You should see a lot of output containing something like the following (much of the output is omitted here for brevity).

​ ​$ ​​bin/elasticsearch​
​ [INFO ][o.e.n.Node ] [] initializing ...
​ ​...​​ ​​many​​ ​​lines​​ ​​omitted​​ ​​...​
​ [INFO ][o.e.h.HttpServer ] [kAh7Q7Z] publish_address {127.0.0.1:9200},
​  bound_addresses {[::1]:9200}, {127.0.0.1:9200}
​ [INFO ][o.e.n.Node ] [kAh7Q7Z] started
​ [INFO ][o.e.g.GatewayService ] [kAh7Q7Z] recovered [0] indices into
​  cluster_state

Notice the publish_address and bound_addresses listed toward the end of the output. By default, Elasticsearch binds TCP port 9200 for its HTTP endpoint.

You can specify a lot of settings when setting up an Elasticsearch cluster. We haven’t specified any here, which means it’s running in development mode. A full discussion of the Elasticsearch cluster settings is outside the scope of this book, but you can read about them on Elastic’s Important System Configuration page.[50]

With Elasticsearch running, we can now implement a command-line utility program for it.