Express Controller Sets

An advanced, unified toolkit for Express.js that accelerates API development by providing automated CRUD operations, dynamic routing capabilities, and robust Amazon S3 file upload handling out of the box.

Full Documentation & Live Demo

Designed to help you build APIs faster by automating repetitive controller logic and middleware configuration while maintaining type safety and flexibility.

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📋 Changelog

Version 3.0.0 — Security release

Fixes several vulnerabilities that were the default behaviour in 2.x. All consumers on public endpoints should upgrade. See MIGRATION.md for the full guide.

• Security: Request bodies are filtered via allowedFields / blockedFields; previously any schema field (role, isAdmin) was client-writable.
• Security: ?compareField=, ?rangeField= and ?sort= are allowlisted; previously they accepted any field name and could be used to read values from fields the API never exposed.
• Security: Search terms are regex-escaped, closing a denial-of-service vector against the database. Opt out with allowRawRegex.
• Security: Uploads default to a private ACL, are validated by content sniffing rather than the client's Content-Type, and are stored with a matching extension and Content-Disposition.
• Security: Unpaginated reads are capped at maxLimit (default 100).
• Security: 5xx responses no longer echo internal error messages; duplicate keys return 409.
• Fix: Relational search resolves the full nested path (author.profile.name).
• Fix: Non-optimizable formats (GIF, SVG) are no longer transcoded into corrupt objects.
• Fix: No import-time dotenv.config() or S3 client construction; sharp and the AWS SDK load lazily.

Version 2.3.5

• New Feature: Added an optional onGet lifecycle hook giving request-time control over .populate() and .select() on all GET operations (getAll, getById, and paginated results).
• New Feature: Integrated sharp for automatic image compression and processing before S3 uploads, optimizing file sizes and delivery.

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🚀 Installation

Install the package using your favorite package manager:

npm install express-controller-sets mongoose express

For S3 upload routes, also install the upload peers:

npm install multer @aws-sdk/client-s3

⚡ Quick Start

Build a full-featured API for your model in just a few lines of code.

import express from 'express';
import { createRouter, errorHandler } from 'express-controller-sets';
import Product from './models/Product.js';

const app = express();
app.use(express.json());

const productRouter = createRouter({
    model: Product,
    orderBy: '-createdAt',              // Sort by newest
    search: ['name', 'category.name'],  // ?search= / ?s=, including relational fields
    query: ['category'],                // ?category= filtering

    // Fields a client is allowed to write. Without this, every schema field
    // is writable through POST and PATCH.
    allowedFields: ['name', 'price', 'category', 'description'],

    // Fields usable with ?compareField= / ?rangeField= and ?sort=.
    filterableFields: ['price', 'category'],
    sortableFields: ['price', 'createdAt'],
});

app.use('/api/products', productRouter);
app.use(errorHandler);

Important

This package generates public endpoints. Authentication and authorization are yours to supply via the middlewares option, and allowedFields is what stands between a client and every writable field on your schema. Neither is applied for you.

Tip

View the Full Documentation & Live Demo for a complete list of endpoints, filtering options, and S3 configuration.

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Released under the MIT License. © 2024-present Sabbir Mahmud