How can I create and deploy a node js blog API backend for a react front end?

Question

I am trying to build a portfolio website using react where I can showcase my projects and skills. I also want a seperate blog section in my website which lists my blog posts. I am aquatinted with node js and rest API so I can create a crud rest API for blog posts locally and use it to get all the blog posts.

How to deploy the blogs rest API online and make it secure such way that only I can access existing and submit new blog posts from my portfolio website after deployment?

Answer 1

This may be too generalized of a question to give you exactly what you're looking for, but we can hit on some broad strokes to give you some idea.

1. Hosting. If you're using Heroku or similar, then they have their own instructions and guides on how to do deploy to their system. If you're self-hosting or are required to setup the host yourself, then you basically just need something that will load balance and auto-restart the node application so that it's always running. Commonly, you can use Docker or PM2 (or a combination of both) to do this. You can then put this behind a web server like Nginx or Apache to fine-tune your configuration.

2. Authentication. If the API is exposed to the public then you need a method of authentication. Commonly, you can use a system that leverages JWTs (login, sign a jwt with the user's ID, then have the client provide the jwt for each protected API request via authentication header or cookie, validate that the token hasn't expired and the user ID is correct, then respond back). You can use a middleware like Passport or write your own (imo Passport may be overkill for smaller projects).