Category: Node.js

During the Fullstack conference I saw a small project made with Hapi.js during a talk, so I decided to invest some time working with Hapi.js in order to investigate how easy it was create a Node.js application with this framework.

I’ve to admit, this is a framework really well done, with a plugin system that give you a lot of flexibility when you are creating your server side applications and with a decent community that provides a lot of useful information and plugins in order to speed up the projects development.

When I started to read the only book available on this framework I was impressed about the simplicity, the consideration behind the framework but more important I was impressed where Hapi.js was used for the first time.
The first enterprise app made with this framework was released during Black Friday on Walmart ecommerce. The results were amazing!
In fact one of the main contributor of this open source framework is Walmart labs, that means a big organisation with real problems to solve; definitely a good starting point!

Express vs Hapi.js

If you are asking why not express, I can reply with few arguments:

• express is a super light and general purpose framework that works perfectly for small – medium size application.
• hapi.js was built on top of express at the beginning but then they move away in order to create something more solid and with more built in functionalities, a framework should speed up your productivity and not giving you a structure to follow.
• express is code base instead hapi.js is configuration base (with a lot of flexibility of course)
• express uses middleware, hapi.js uses plugins
• hapi.js is built with testing and security in mind!

Hapi.js

Let’s start saying working with this framework is incredibly easy when you understand the few concepts you need to know in order to create a Node project.

I created a sample project where I’ve integrated a mongo database, exposing few end points in order to add a new document inside a mongo collection, update a specific document, retrieve all documents available inside the database and  retrieving all the details of a selected document.

Inside the git repo you can find also the front end code (books.html in the project root) in Vanilla Javascript, mainly because if you are passionate about React or Angular or any other front end library, you’ll be able to understand the integration without any particular framework knowledge.

What I’m going to describe now will be how I’ve structured the server side code with Hapi.js.

In order to create a server in Hapi.js you just need few lines of code:

let server = new Hapi.Server();
server.connection();
server.start((err) => console.log('Server started at:', server.info.uri));

As you can see in the example (src/index.js) I’ve created the server in the first few lines after the require statements and I started the server (server.start) after the registration of the mongoDB plugin, but one step per time.

After creating the server object, I’ve defined my routes with server.route method.
The route method will allow you to set just 1 route with an object or several routes creating an array of objects.
Each route should contain the method parameter where you’ll define the method to reach the path, you can also set a wildcard (*) so any method will be accepted in order to retrieve that path.
Obviously then you have to set the route path, bear in mind you have to start always with slash (/) in order to define correctly the path.
The path accepts also variables inside curly brackets as you can see in the last route of my example: path: ‘/bookdetails/{id}’.

Last but not least you need to define what’s going to happen when a client is requesting that particular path specifying the handler property.
Handler expects a function with 2 parameters: request and reply.

This is a basic route implementation:

{
   method: 'GET',
   path: '/allbooks',
   handler: (request, reply) => { ... }
}

When you structure a real application, and not an example like this one, you can wrap the handler property inside the config property.
Config accepts an object that will become your controller for that route.
So as you can see it’s really up to you pick up the right design solution for your project, it could be inline because it’s a small project or a PoC rather than an external module because you have a large project where you want to structure properly your code in a MVC fashion way (we’ll see that in next blog post ;-)).
In my example I created the config property also because you can then use an awesome library called JOI in order to validate the data received from the client application.
Validate data with JOI is really simple:

validate: {
   payload: {
      title: Joi.string().required(),
      author: Joi.string().required(),
      pages: Joi.number().required(),
      category: Joi.string().required()
   }
}

In my example for instance I checked if I receive the correct amount of arguments (required()) and in the right format (string() or number()).

MongoDB plugin

Now that we have understood how to create a simple server with Hapi.js let’s go in deep on the Hapi.js plugin system, the most important part of this framework.
You can find several plugins created by the community, and on the official website you can find also a tutorial that explains step by step how to create a custom plugin for hapi.js.

In my example I used the hapi-mongodb plugin that allows me to connect a mongo database with my node.js application.
If you are more familiar with mongoose you can always use the mongoose plugin for Hapi.js.
One important thing to bear in mind of an Hapi.js plugin is that when it’s registered will be accessible from any handler method via request.server.plugins, so it’s injected automatically from the framework in order to facilitate the development flow.
So the first thing to do in order to use our mongodb plugin on our application is register it:

server.register({
   register: MongoDB,
   options: DBConfig.opts
}, (err) => {
   if (err) {
      console.error(err);
      throw err;
   }

   server.start((err) => console.log('Server started at:', server.info.uri));
});

As you can see I need just to specify which plugin I want to use in the register method and its configuration.
This is an example of the configuration you need to specify in order to connect your MongoDB instance with the application:

module.exports = {
   opts: {
      "url": "mongodb://username:password@id.mongolab.com:port/collection-name",       
      "settings": {          
         "db": {             
            "native_parser": false         
         }
      }    
   }
}

In my case the configuration is an external object where I specified the mongo database URL and the settings.
If you want a quick and free solution to use mongoDB on the cloud I can suggest mongolab, when you register you’ll have 500mb of data for free per account, so for testing purpose is really the perfect cloud service!
Last but not least, when the plugin registration happened I can start my server.

When I need to use your plugin inside any handler function I’ll be able to retrieve my plugin in this way:

var db = request.server.plugins['hapi-mongodb'].db;

In my sample application, I was able to create few cases: add a new document (addbook route), retrieve all the books (allbooks route) and the details of a specific book (bookdetails route).

If you want to update a record in mongo, remember to use update method over insert method, because, if correctly handled, update method will check inside your database if there are any other occurrences and if there is one it will update that occurrence otherwise it will create a new document inside the mongo collection.
Below an extract of this technique, where you specify in the first object the key for searching an item, then the object to replace with and last object you need to add is an object with upsert set to true (by default is false) that will allow you to create the new document if it doesn’t exist in your collection:

db.collection('books').updateOne({"title": request.payload.title}, dbDoc, {upsert: true}, (err, result) => {
    if(err) return reply(Boom.internal('Internal MongoDB error', err));
    return reply(result);
});

SAMPLE PROJECT GITHUB REPOSITORY

Resources

If you are interested to go more in deep about Hapi.js, I’d suggest to take a look to the official website or to the book currently available.
An interesting news is that there are other few books that will be published soon regarding Hapi.js:

• Getting started with Hapi.js
• A PHP guy learns Hapi
• Hapi.js in action

that usually means Hapi js is getting adopt from several companies and developers and definitely it’s a good sign for the health of the framework.

Wrap up

In this post I shared with you a quick introduction to Hapi.js framework and his peculiarities.
If you’ve enjoyed please let me know what you would interested on so I’ll be able to prepare other posts with the topics you prefer.
Probably the next one will be on the different template systems (handlebars, react…) or about universal application (or isomorphic application as you prefer to call them) or a test drive of few plugins to use in Hapi.js web applications.

Anyway I’ll wait for your input as well 😀