Dev Round-up - JWT, Env Var and a little Express.js

Posted by Al Tsang on March 20, 2018 in technology

Thanks to the hard work and dedicated developer community we have experienced some of the biggest milestones to date. Now it’s time to share a quick round up of the most popular posts, How-Tos and videos in case you may have missed all of the action. Also, get a sneak peek at what’s in store for the next release!

Built by Devs for Devs on Express.js

Let’s start with an important announcement! Express Gateway was recently added to the official Express.js list of frameworks built on Express.js. Express.js is a minimalistic framework for Node.js. We chose Express.js for it’s vast ecosystem of middleware, adoption and we’re huge fans of just keeping it simple.

Now it’s time for a round up of the in-depth technical How-tos.

JSON Web Tokens

In addition to a step-by-step getting started technical guide, we’ve also put together a video tutorial on setting up JSON Web Tokens. Whether you are initiating JSON Web Tokens by other identity servers, like Auth0, or when you actually initiate and manage the JWTs through an Identity Server - we’ve got you covered.

You can also check out the technical getting started guide.

Environment Variables

Exploring the ins-n-outs of environment variables? We added support for environment variables in Express Gateway and created a step-by-step guide and video walkthrough of how to get started.

How To Use Environment Variables In Express Gateway with Vincenzo Chianese on Vimeo.

Inhale the Good Gateway

After releasing the latest 1.7.3, we’ve gotten a great response and also quite a few questions about what’s next. Given that this project is being put to work by developers in production environments, this is a very important question.

So, you can always learn more about upcoming features and releases by checking out the Express Gateway Roadmap. Something you may not see in there is for 1.7.4 - we’re going to be making some noise about Docker. With the latest major updates, it’s going to be a big one and we’ll share more details as the updated Docker images.

What Else? A little something special.

In addition to all of the great How-Tos, we’ve put together a more in depth look about getting the important metrics you need, when you need them. As a reminder, we’ve created a nice visual so you can understand how requests are routed.

In this technical rundown, you can see how to scaffold a Plugin, use an API Gateway to to add application specific metrics. By the end, you’ll be able to expose the metrics through an HTTP endpoint that can be queried by an external service, such as Prometheus.

So, you can also read all about how to get it into production with a live example.

Moving On

Code snippets, guides and videos are just the start of something great. It’s time to go build something great! We’d love to know more about how you’re putting this open source, API Gateway to work. So if you’ve been hard at work building, hit us up on our Gitter channel.

More Resources

Join the community on our Gitter channel
Learn more about upcoming features and releases by checking out the Express Gateway Roadmap