Node.js Best Practices — Error Handling and Logging

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Node.js is a popular runtime to write apps in JavaScript. To make maintaining them easier, we’ve to set some guidelines for people to follow.

In this article, we’ll look at how to document APIs and gracefully exit processes.

Document API errors using GraphQL

We can build our API using GraphQL libraries. This provides us with a sandbox for querying data. It also provides strong typing and only returns what we want.

It also provides schema and comments so that we can document our APIs without adding more documentation.

To create a GraphQL API, we can use the graphql and express-graphql packages to create a GraphQL API. We install it by running:

npm i express-graphql graphql

Then we can create a simple GraphQL API by writing:

const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const graphqlHTTP = require('express-graphql');
const { buildSchema } = require('graphql');
const app = express();
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
const schema = buildSchema(`
  type Query {
    quoteOfTheDay: String
  }
`);