README

xprs middleware stack

A bundle of most-commonly-used middlewares for express, based on analyzing over 80,000 public GitHub repos on BigQuery.

I am tired of having to install various common Express middlewares such as body-parser, cors, … every time I start a new API project with Express. I think, some middlewares are just used so often they could have been in the core. So I ran some numbers on Google BigQuery to find out which are the most commonly used Express middleware

Synopsis

const xprs = require('xprs')
const app = xprs()

…is equivalent to…

const express = require('express')
const bodyParser = require('body-parser')
const morgan = require('morgan')
const cookieParser = require('cookie-parser')
const methodOverride = require('method-override')
const compression = require('compression')
const helmet = require('helmet')

const app = express()
app.enable('trust proxy')
app.use(methodOverride())
app.use(morgan(process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' ? 'combined' : 'dev'))
app.use(compression())
app.use(helmet())
app.use(bodyParser.json({ limit: '10mb' }))
app.use(bodyParser.text({ limit: '10mb' }))
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true, limit: '10mb' }))
app.use(bodyParser.raw({ type: '*/*', limit: '10mb' }))
app.use(cookieParser())

Middleware list

Having looked at 126,822 files from 80,151 repositories, I came up with a list of top Express middlewares.

Middleware	Popularity (number of repos, █ = 1k repos)
`serve-static`	██████████████████████████████████████
`body-parser`	████████████████████████████
`morgan`	██████████████████████████
`cookie-parser`	█████████████████
`method-override`	██████████
`compression`	████████
`cors`	███
`helmet`	██
`http-proxy-middleware`	█

Bundled type definitions

TypeScript definitions are bundled along with this package, so you don't have to…

{
  "devDependencies": {
  // No need!
    "@types/compression": "^1.7.0",
    "@types/cookie-parser": "^1.4.2",
    "@types/cors": "^2.8.6",
    "@types/express": "^4.17.5",
    "@types/helmet": "^0.0.45",
    "@types/http-proxy-middleware": "^0.19.3",
    "@types/method-override": "^0.0.31",
    "@types/morgan": "^1.9.0",
    "@types/serve-static": "^1.13.3"
  }
}

Configuration

Check out the default options in src/index.ts.

Turning features off

Don’t need or don’t want some features? You can turn any of them off… in fact, you can turn all of them off!

const xprs = require('xprs')
const app = xprs({
  trustProxy: false,
  methodOverride: false,
  morgan: false,
  compression: false,
  helmet: false,
  json: false,
  text: false,
  urlencoded: false,
  raw: false,
  cookie: false,
})

…is equivalent to…

const express = require('express')
const app = express()

Manually enabling some features

Some features have to be manually enabled.

cors
```
const app = xprs({ cors: true })
```

serve-static

const app = xprs({ static: `${__dirname}/public` })

http-proxy-middleware

const app = xprs()
app.use(
  '/api',
  xprs.createProxyMiddleware({
    target: 'http://www.example.org',
    changeOrigin: true,
  }),
)

Re-exported modules

You can access all the bundled modules:

xprs.express
xprs.static
xprs.serveStatic
xprs.bodyParser
xprs.morgan
xprs.cookieParser
xprs.methodOverride
xprs.compression
xprs.cors
xprs.helmet
xprs.httpProxyMiddleware
xprs.createProxyMiddleware

Usage no npm install needed!