saketkothari / api-proxy-server

Utilizing Node.js and Express to create a server for enhanced security with hidden API keys, rate limiting, and efficient caching to optimize API performance.

Node API Proxy Server

• Server used for hiding API keys, rate limiting and caching.
• This uses the OpenWeather API but you can easily change it to whatever public API you are using.

In this we can hide our public API keys by using our own server because in a lot of cases when you use a third-party API like the Github API or Twitter or in our case we're going to be using Open Weather API, a lot of times you need to include your API key directly in the url when you make your request So here I have a very simple just client-side Vanilla JavaScript Weather app that uses Open Weather API and we can just put in a city name and it just you know gets the the temperature but if I open up my source code here and I look in my main.js you'll see that in this fetch weather function I'm making a request directly to open weather map and I have my API key or my app id directly in my client-side code which you really don't want to show.

So there's a few ways around this and in one way is to just have your own server your own API proxy server which is kind of like a middleman that you can make requests to and then store your API key on the server so that's what I want to do and in addition to that how we can add things like rate limiting so people can only make a certain amount of requests per a certain amount of time and we'll show you how to add some caching.

Usage

Install dependencies

npm install

Run on http://localhost:5000

npm run dev

Add public API info

Rename .env.example to .env and edit the values

If the public API URL is https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q={city}&appid={APIkey}

• API_BASE_URL = "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather"
• API_KEY_NAME = "appid"
• API_KEY_VALUE = "YOUR API KEY"

You can add on any other query params as needed when hitting the /api endpoint such as https://yourdomain/api?q=detroit without having to add your key in the client

• Add new routes as you see fit
• Change rate limiting and caching to desired values