If you’re building a blog with the Jamstack your content might be stored in a git repository. This can help to reduce overhead, since a database is no longer required, but presents other interesting challenges like displaying post metadata. This may include the date the post was created or the date it was last updated, information that can be helpful to readers and enhances the display of the post in search engine results. We can use Node.js …

Jamstack blogs, or otherwise static sites that are built with prerendered markup can load quickly and cost less to run, however one potential drawback of a serverless approach for a blog can be the lack of a content management system. Without using a database or a headless content management system, blogs built with the Jamstack are most likely storing their content in a git repository, and this git-centric approach to development provides an interesting pathway for storing and managing blog comments. …

To mitigate Cross-site request forgery attacks, websites that submit forms can include a nonce, to make sure that the request is being sent from the origin that is expected. This way, a post request containing the nonce, or public token, can be verified with a secret, and stored on the server before mutating any data. Using a CSRF token doesn’t guarantee that a website will be safe from malicious requests, however it can help prevent malicious requests, or requests generated by automated bots.

This example will show how a publicly available HTML form, can be submitted using the Fetch API…

Let’s say you are building a site with the Jamstack and you want to use node.js to generate the rss feed for your site. In doing so you realize that your post content contains relative links when checking with the validator provided by the W3C Feed validation service, and it indicates elements should not contain relative URL references. In order to make sure the RSS feed is valid, and only containing absolute URLs, we can use the cheerio npm package to parse an HTML source and transform relative anchor links and image sources to absolute URLs. …

Running too many asynchronous processes simultaneously with Node.js can cause issues that will lead to the process crashing. An example of this is when reading files inside of an asynchronous callback function that is being executed using the map() method on an array. To prevent a scenario where the node.js process might crash with an EMFILE error, it can be helpful to split an array into smaller arrays or chunks, and process the group of smaller arrays synchronously while asynchronously mapping over the items in each of the smaller arrays. By doing this the contents of the original array can…

Before developing with Azure Serverless Functions and Azure Table storage locally, there are some tools required to emulate Azure Storage and provide a run-time environment for the Node.js serverless functions. Please make sure the prerequisites are set up before running the example code that follows.

Setup Azure Storage Emulator

In order to save on development costs, instead of creating cloud resources, we can install the Azure Storage Emulator for development and testing. If you aren’t using windows, Azurite is an open source Azure storage API compatible server, and it is recommended by Microsoft to use. Otherwise, after installing, Windows users can search in the…

As of Node.js version 13.2.0 ECMAScript modules are now supported by default without adding an experimental flag. Although, using ES Modules without making the required configuration changes will result in the error “SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module”. This is because Node.js, by default, is expecting the CommonJS module format.

Using TypeScript in combination with ES Modules brings many added benefits. To use TypeScript with ES Modules, the TypeScript compiler configuration in tsconfig.json can be updated to process code in ES Module format. Additionally, Babel can be used for TypeScript compilation, and the TypeScript compiler will be used…

The uuid, or universally unique identifier, npm package is a secure way to generate cryptographically strong unique identifiers with Node.js that doesn’t require a large amount of code. The uuid npm package has zero dependencies, and over thirty thousand packages depend on it, making it a safe choice when an id is needed that is guaranteed to be unique. It supports commonJS modules and also ECMAScript Modules, making it a good cross-platform choice. …