Learn Express, Github and Twit

As developers, we have a responsibility to protect the data our users trust us with. No one wants to wake up to the news that their site was hacked and all of the user accounts stolen.

Security is important, yet it is often overlooked and forgotten.

Part of the reason for this is that security seems hard to get right. This results in developers crossing their fingers and hoping for the best.

In this course, you'll learn how to protect your application by learning how to attack it.

Start your journey into web security today!

Check out these [**community notes for this course on Github**](https://github.com/wjohnson85/eggheadio-web-security-essentails).

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

Web Security Essentials: MITM, CSRF, and XSS

Express is a well-known and supported framework for Node web applications. It provides a lot of excellent functionality to process requests, interact with other APIs, handle authentication and return appropriate requests for any client.

This collection will look at providing an API for a specific application but will explore concepts that will be helpful in building a wide variety of applications.

Building an API with Express

SSH provides a secure way for your to [connect to and authenticate with GitHub's servers](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/about-ssh). While HTTPS connections use usernames and passwords as credentials, SSH instead uses public and private key pairs. These can be generated on your system using a CLI like [`ssh-keygen`](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent) and then associated with your GitHub account using the public key.

In some cases, you may need to connect to more than one GitHub account from the same system. For example, you may have [separate accounts for personal and professional projects](https://ryanharris.dev/managing-ssh-keys-for-github/), which can be difficult to manage manually. Using `ssh-agent` and a SSH configuration file, you can alleviate this pain point by automatically determining which key to use based on your GitHub repository's `git` URL.

Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. Bash is a command processor that typically runs in a text window, where the user types commands that cause actions. Bash can also read and execute commands from a file, called a shell script.

bash

Secure GitHub connections with SSH

Github Actions are an awesome tool from Github that allows us to automate tasks using code-based workflow configuration files. There's also a large marketplace that comes stocked with many useful tools that are ready out of the box.

But sometimes the options available don't completely solve our needs or maybe we're working with a new technology that's simply not available as an Action yet. Luckily, Github allows anyone to create their own Actions using common technologies like Javascript via Node.

We'll learn how to create a new Javascript-based Github Action running on Node. We'll first walk through a simple Hello World example, learn how to test it locally, version control it, use it in the wild, and move on to more advanced solutions that include using packages from npm!

GitHub fosters a fast, flexible, and collaborative development process that lets you work on your own or with others.

github

Create a New Github Action to Automate Code Tasks with Javascript

Modern applications know how to keep users informed of realtime updates through notifications, popups, and other messages.

On the development side, the ability to not only create web apps but have them communicate in realtime is a quirky, standout skill for your resume. It’s interesting, useful, and powerful.

In this course, Mark Barton will show you how to use Socket.io to facilitate bi-directional client-server communication and notifications using Vue on the frontend. Socket.io is a JS library that connects a client-side library to a node.js server. In the course, you’ll see how to use Socket.io to broadcast simultaneously to all or targeted clients based on filters you set up — so the right people see the right message at the right time.

You’ll learn to set up and connect Socket.io with node.js and Vue, and you’ll get practice making informed, complex architectural decisions around realtime broadcast messaging.

Vue (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is very easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

Vue and Socket.io for Real-Time Communication

Learn how to build a simple REST API to store notes using the latest built-in node features including native ES modules, the fs/promises API, async/await, the nullish coalescing operator, and destructuring. No compilers, no build steps, pure code.

This collection of lessons is great for beginners to Express as long as they are familiar with JavaScript and the HTTP protocol. Those more familiar with node and express will appreciate a fast-paced, modern take on using these popular tools and will likely benefit most from the lessons on input validation, models (which emphasizes a lot of new syntax), using fs/promises to serialize a `Map`, and accessing asynchronous data with `async/await`.

Pre-requisites:

- [Install curl](https://curl.haxx.se/)
- [Install node 14](http://nodejs.org/)
- Be familiar with the terminal

View the source for this project in the [project's github repo](https://github.com/xjamundx/egghead-express).

**Notes**:

- I'm not very pedantic about REST and basically just mean an API over HTTP
- [Express 5](https://expressjs.com/en/guide/migrating-5.html) is still in alpha (and has been for over two years), but most of these lessons apply to Express 4 as long you use something like [express-async-errors](https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-async-errors) to add support for `async` routes and middleware

Build a REST API with Express 5 and node 14

Handy tips for boosting your productivity in GitHub. These are bite-sized things you can take advantage of today to boost your efficiency by 1% or more. What are you waiting for? Check 'em out! 

GitHub Tips & Tricks

GitHub Actions are a powerful workflow tool that allows you to write and use custom code to execute workflows. It's like a serverless CI/CD platform built directly into GitHub. We have access to GitHub's registries, our own repos, multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux), runtimes (VMs and Containers), and languages (JS, Rust, Go, etc) to perform any action we want. We can trigger workflows using GitHub's own events, our custom events, or even scheduled events like a cronjob.

GitHub Actions at Work

While this course is for IBM Domino Developers who are looking to utilize Node.js alongside their applications, or Javascript developers looking to integrate with a Domino server. There are quite a few tips and tricks you can learn for integrating Node.js as a proxy server for any REST API you might want to communicate with your JavaScript Application.

We cover how you can continue to use cookies provided by IBM Domino for user authentication and authorization while accessing a Node.js / Express based application, including modifying the standard login form to expose authentication errors.  

We show how to store user level information inside a JWT giving the option to store functional levels of access safely.  This stateless token can then be decoded server side to list what user roles a user has and therefore can restrict functionality without having to refer back to Domino each time.

The course will demonstrate Create, Read, Update and Delete methods using the Domino Data Services all via the NodeJS application but still maintaining Domino security.

And finally, we show how you can reuse Domino generated HTML inside a handlebars template by scraping and manipulating the HTML.

Integrate IBM Domino with Node.js

JSON Web Token (JWT) is a low overhead option for authentication that is easy to implement and scales with your application. There is no need to store session data as everything you need is stored in an encoded string sent in the JWT, significantly reducing database overhead for your servers.

In this course, we will build a simple authentication server that will act as a token issuer, and we will use those tokens to access resources on an API.  Starting from scratch, you will learn how easy token based authentication can be and will understand how to use them on your APIs as well as on the front end of your web applications.

JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication with Node.js and Auth0

In this course we’ll learn how to create Twitter bots. We’ll first learn how to interface with the Twitter API using Twit.js, which allows us to post statuses, search tweets, and interact with followers. We’ll create several example bots that show the diversity of possibilities, using powerful tools such as RiTa.js, Google’s Cloud Vision API, and Tracery. We’ll learn how to tweet data from Google Spreadsheets, and to compose and tweet a song for an audio bot. We’ll also learn how to host our bot logic on Heroku and Docker. 

Twitter API Client for node

Supports both the REST and Streaming API.

twit

Create your own twitter bots

Publishing a JavaScript library for public use requires some extra steps. You need to think about how people will use the library. From end users, to contributors your library now has a variety of people outside of yourself potentially making use of the code that you've released into the wild.

From Github and npm, to releasing beta versions, semantic versioning, code coverage, continuous integration, and providing your library with a solid set of unit tests, there are a ton of things to learn.

This series will guide you through a set of steps to publish a JavaScript open source library.

You might also enjoy [this article about contributing to open source](https://egghead.io/articles/get-started-contributing-to-javascript-open-source).

How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library

“Feel free to submit a PR!” - words often found in GitHub issues, but met with confusion and fear by many. Getting started with contributing open source is not always straightforward and can be tricky. With this series, you’ll be equipped with the the tools, knowledge, and understanding you need to be productive and contribute to the wonderful world of open source projects. Much of this series speaks about GitHub, but most of the concepts are generally applicable to contributing to any open source project, regardless of where it’s hosted.

So enjoy the course and start contributing to the projects you use and love today!

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Nodejs

Express is a minimal web server built on Node.js that provides essential functionality for delivering web applications to the browser and mobile devices. This series will guide you through the first steps of using Express for building your own applications.

Getting Started with Express.js

In this lesson, we’ll apply our knowledge of `getopts` and create a script that opens a PR on Github, all without leaving your terminal. We’ll use `getopts` to take 3 options: username, password or token, and PR title. We’ll use any input after that as the body of the PR. We’ll validate the input and then use `curl` to POST it to Github. 

Create a Bash Script to Open a Pull Request on Github using getopts

In this lesson we create a very simple web page to connect to our socket Server.

Once a client connects, it is assigned a unique random identifier as its socket ID and we will log this out to the Server console.

We will send out a random number on the socket every second and demonstrate multiple clients receiving this value at the same time.



Set up a simple Socket.io client to connect to the server.

In this lesson we connect a Vue application to our Socket Server.  

We use the pulse from the previous lesson to display a graph using the Vuetify framework and then demonstrate 2 clients showing the graph changing in sync.

Connect a Vue.js Component to a Socket.io server

**Note:** If you want to understand and follow along with the logging service Mark uses, watch this lesson: [NodeJS Logging using Winston and Papertrail](https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-nodejs-logging-using-winston-and-papertrail)

In this lesson we will get an Express Server up and running with Socket.io.  We will build the Socket.io logic in a seperate file to demonstrate how the Socket.io instance can be used within other parts of the Express Application.

This lesson is short and sweet and lays the groundwork for the other lessons in this course. 

If you get an error starting the server which indicates a Papertrail connection error then you have not updated the Papertrail host and port in the logger.js.

You can safely ignore this error if you do not wish to use Papertrail - else you can sign up to a free Papertrail account and add the correct host and port.

Getting started with Express and Socket.io

Using a HTTP POST to trigger a message which is broadcast to all connected clients via Socket.io.  The message is displayed within a Vue component, which in this case is a [Vuetify snackbar](https://vuetifyjs.com/en/components/snackbars) component. 

As part of the lesson we demonstrate transmitting an object so we can dynamically change the snackbar color, as well as the message itself.

An example where this approach might be used is where you want a server monitoring system call a web hook on your server when there is an issue, this in turn pushes a message to connected clients, simultaneously and in real time.

Display a broadcast message using a Vuetify snackbar component which is sent via Socket.io

Often we need to send data to specific users or groups of users using Socket.io, but by default Socket.io only provides a unique volatile ID so this lesson will demonstrate how we can map on the Server a known User with that Socket ID.

The lesson will build a new Vue component which will allow a User to select their name and group and then send this information from the client to the server using the Socket.

This lesson will also use SessionStorage to store this information so if the browser is refreshed then the component will be auto populated and the details sent to the server.

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