Optimize Your Express App for Smooth Performance: Best Practices

Introduction

As developers, we all strive to create applications that are not only functional but also secure and performant. However, in the process of developing a Node-Express application, we may overlook some best practices that can significantly enhance the overall quality of our code. In this tech blog, we will explore some of the best practices that can be easily implemented at any stage of development to improve the performance and security of our Node-Express application. By following these practices, we can ensure that our application is robust, efficient, and secure.

1. Using Helmet

While riding a motorbike we use helmet to secure ourselves from an accident. We use helmet to secure of express js app.

With every HTTP request, we get a HTTP response header. This header is a important with security point of view because many attacks happens because of the loopholes on the header.

Express by default adds a field in the in the Response header that shows which tech stack/framework you’re using to make this app.

X-Powered-By: Express
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 15

This X-Powered-By header shows which framework you’re using on backend. This trait can make our app vulnerable to attacks because it’s not a good practice to expose this info to public.

For this we use Helmet library. This is a very easy to use library and can be easy configured with the help of npm.

Install it using NPM

npm install helmet

Import the package into you’re app

const helmet = require("helmet")

Now, register helmet in your Express application with the below

// Enables the middleware
app.use(helmet())

That’s it 🥳!! We’re good to go.

If you want you to configure it according to your functionalities.

npm: helmet

2. Compression

Compression is a simple, effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site.
When we request a page from a web server, it is usually too heavy to load which leads to a bad user experience.

We can use an npm package compression for this problem, which provides a middleware function.
It compresses all the responses and specifies them in the response header.

We can also specify the content-type according to our requirements.

var compression = require('compression')
var express = require('express')

var app = express()

// compress all responses
app.use(compression())

// add all routes

It’s that simple 😎!!!!

npm: compression

3. Node Environment

In an Express server, NODE_ENV is an environment variable that specifies whether the application is running in development or production mode. This value can be used to perform specific tasks such as enabling or disabling debugging, specifying a specific port to listen on, and more.

By setting NODE_ENV to "production", we can take advantage of various optimizations provided by Express. As a result, setting NODE_ENV to "production" is a simple yet effective way to improve the performance of an Express application.

Now the question is how can we do this thing:

• For Mac/Linux

 export NODE_ENV=production

For Windows

$env:NODE_ENV = 'production'

We can also set it while running the app:

NODE_ENV=production node app.js

That’s it 🚀.

Conclusion:

In my advice for improving app performance with Express, I focused on simple yet effective strategies that are convenient for beginners to use. However, there are many more ways to optimize performance that more experienced developers may want to explore.

To ensure the accuracy and reliability of my recommendations, I conducted research on this topic and consulted the official Express documentation. I found the documentation to be a valuable resource and highly recommend it to anyone looking to further their understanding of Express and its capabilities.

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