Make a Simple URL Shortener app with Node.js & Express.js + Rest API

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Have you ever thought to learn a Node.js ? Trying out simple projects such as ToDoApps & WeathersApp will help you learn new things quickly so I decided to create a simple URL shortener with Node.js & Express.js and become familiar with Node.js Applications. To make this Application we follow the below steps:

👋 Initial Step

First, we need to create a fresh folder, we called it nodejs-url-shortener after that we have to make package.json with follow commands:

$ yarn init 

This command helps you to make the package.json with some question like project name, version, license, repository, etc. Our dependencies will now be installed via the following command:

$ yarn install -D mongoose express nodemon ejs

NOTE: Please make sure you installed MongoDB on your computer

Let me now explain a little about the package we installed, in our case we install nodemon to reload our application after a single change without the need to stop/start the app, we use MongoDB to save our data in a simple database and also we install express to handle the HTTP Requests. if you want to make a simple view for your application you need to install ejs too.