Like any kind of apps, JavaScript apps also have to be written well.

Otherwise, we run into all kinds of issues later on.

In this article, we’ll look at some best practices we should follow when writing Node apps.

Monitoring

We must monitor our app to make sure that it’s in a healthy state.

The number of restarts, resource usage, and more indicates how our app is doing.

We use these tools to get a good idea of what’s happening in production

Delegate Anything Possible to a Reverse Proxy

Anything that can be done by a reverse proxy should be done by it.

So we can use one like Nginx to do things like SSL, gzipping, etc.

Otherwise, our app would be busy dealing with network tasks rather than dealing with the app’s core tasks.

Express has middleware for all these tasks, but it’s better to offload them to a reverse proxy because Node’s single thread model would keep our app busy just doing networking tasks.

Make Use of SSL

SSL is a given since we don’t want attackers to snoop the communication channels between our clients and the server.

We should use a reverse proxy for this so we can delegate this to it rather than using our app for SSL.

Smart Logging

We can use a logging platform to make logging and searching the logs easier.

Otherwise, everything our app is doing is a black box.

Then if troubles arise, we’ll have problems fixing issues since we don’t know what’s going on.

Lock Dependencies

Dependencies should be locked so that new version won’t be installed without changing the version explicitly.

The NPM config in each environment should have the exact version and not the latest version of every package.

We can use npm shrinkwrap for finer controls of the dependencies.

They’re locked by default by NPM so we don’t have to worry about this.

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