A Simple NodeJS Proxy API Server

Welcome to a Simple Proxy API Server using NodeJS.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Getting Started
  • Installation
  • Environment Variable
• Quick Start
• Development Documentation

Introduction

This is a project about building a Simple Proxy API Server using NodeJS.

The project's functionalities will be:

• Getting weather data from OpenWeather API.
• Rate Limiting Requests. Rate Limiting Requests based on previous proxy servers headers.
• Cache Responses. Cache Responses which have 200 status code.

Getting Started

I recommend running this project on NodeJS v20+ or NodeJS v22+. This project was originally run on NodeJS v21.7.1 and npm@10.5.0.

Installation

To get started, you need to download this project from the GitHub repository and navigate to the project's folder.

cd nodejs-simple-proxy-api/

You need to dowload the project's dependencies.

npm install

Additionally, you should download an extra package for running the project, it's called nodemon.

npm i nodemon --save-dev

Environment Variable

This step is important! Create an .env file to store the application's credentials. These are the credentials you will need.

BE_PORT="" # IMPORTANT: This is the back end port, you need to have this variable for the project to work!
OPENWEATHER_API_BASE_URL=""
OPENWEATHER_API_KEY_NAME=""
OPENWEATHER_API_KEY_VALUE=""

Quick Start

Run the project using the following command(s).

npm start

Or, if you have already downloaded nodemon using npm i nodemon --save-dev, you can also run the project using the following commands(s).

npm run api

We also provide some Postman command inside the .postman folder.

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Development Documentation

Order from newest to oldest

2024/11/05

• Using express-rate-limit to limit the request. Because this program is a proxy, it will be a proxy server in a line of multiple proxy servers, so in addition of express-rate-limit, I will also use app.set("trust proxy", 1) to tell this proxy server to trust the information pass on from the previous proxy servers, this helps express-rate-limit to accurately identify and rate limit the requests.

• More information on app.set("trust proxy", 1), the setting tell the program to trust the information pass on from the previous proxy servers, you can use app.set("trust proxy", <number>) with <number> being the number of proxies you want to trust or you can use app.set("trust proxy", true) to trust all of the previous proxies.

• Using apicache to cache responses and make response faster (in-memory version, although apicache does support redis). The use of cache reduce the wait time from >100ms to <5ms.

2024/11/04

• Using needle() to perform HTTP requests, I choose needle() because it is rather light-weight and simple to use.

2024/11/02

• Initialize: the project