Building a Production-Ready Node.js Web API with Sails.js

Getting Started with Sails.js

To get started, we’ll need to install the Sails.js CLI tool globally on our machine. We can do this by running the command npm install -g sails in our terminal. Once installed, we can create a new Sails application by running sails new my-sails-api and then cd into the newly created directory.

Project Structure

The Sails.js framework provides a default project structure that includes directories for controllers, models, policies, and more. We’ll focus on the api directory, where we’ll define our API endpoints.

Creating Our First Endpoint

Let’s create our first endpoint by defining a route in the routes.js file. We’ll add the following code to create a route for the / endpoint:

'GET /': 'HomeController.index'

Next, we’ll create the HomeController and its index action. We can do this by running sails generate controller home and then adding the following code to the index action:

module.exports = {
  index: async function(req, res) {
    return res.json({ message: 'Welcome to our API!' });
  }
};

Building the User Management Endpoints

Now that we have our first endpoint up and running, let’s build the user management endpoints. We’ll start by creating a User model using the sails generate model user command. We’ll then define the attributes for the User model, including fullName, email, password, and more.

Next, we’ll create the registration endpoint by defining a route in the routes.js file:

'POST /user/register': 'UserController.register'

We’ll then create the register action in the UserController and add the necessary logic to create a new user record and send a confirmation email.

Implementing Login and Password Reset

To implement the login feature, we’ll create a login action in the UserController and add the necessary logic to authenticate the user and return a JSON Web Token (JWT). We’ll also create a forgotPassword action to handle password reset requests.

Deployment to Heroku

Finally, we’ll deploy our API to Heroku by creating a new Heroku app and adding the necessary environment variables. We’ll also need to configure our database settings and add the Heroku PostgreSQL add-on.

• Create a new Heroku app: https://heroku.com/new
• Add environment variables: heroku config:set SAILS_ENV=production
• Configure database settings: heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

With these steps, we’ve successfully built and deployed a production-ready Node.js web API using Sails.js.