concept front end in category api

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Irresistible APIs: Designing web APIs that developers will love. Login to get full access to this book.

Figure 1.4. The basic interactions with an API are direct connections with the back-end server or servers, and a well-defined interaction with clients on the front end. This allows for countless frontend applications, whether mobile, website desktop, or system integrations, without changes to the back-end servers.

From there you can access the system at http://localhost:3000 (or port 3000 on whichever server you’re using). Node.js runs on port 3000 by default, so if you want to expose the system on the standard port (80), you’ll want to run a separate server on the front end—something like Nginx or Apache—and then create a reverse proxy back to the node server. For security reasons it’s best not to use root to run a bare web service, and you can’t access the standard ports as a regular user. This is one of the advantages to using the Docker system—because it’s isolated from the rest of your system at its own IP address, it’s safe to run the front-end server on port 80.