How to Make A Map Generator Using The MERN Stack And TypeScript — Part 1: Setting Up The Back End

Let’s get a simple API running

An image generated by the generator

Goal

The aim of this part will be to configure the back end of our generator, install all the dependencies needed, create the architecture, and have a simple API running.

Starting up

In our root folder, let’s start by creating two sub folders: one named server, and another named react.

In this part, we’ll only focus on the server part. Head into that folder then run

npm init -y

This will generate a package.json file in the folder.

Now, let’s install the dependencies we will need to make it run:

npm install cors express
npm install --save-dev @types/cors @types/express @types/node ts-node

Now let’s create a tsconfig.json file with this content:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "commonjs",
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "target": "es6",
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "sourceMap": true,
    "outDir": "dist",
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      "*": [
        "node_modules/*"…