Building RESTful APIs is fundamental for modern web applications, providing a standardized way for clients to communicate with servers. As the creator of CoreUI with over 12 years of Node.js experience since 2014, I’ve architected numerous REST APIs serving millions of requests. Express is the most popular Node.js framework for building APIs, offering routing, middleware, and request/response handling. This approach follows REST conventions for creating scalable, maintainable backend services.

Creating an Express project provides a robust foundation for building web applications and APIs in Node.js with minimal configuration and maximum flexibility. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I’ve set up countless Express projects for backend services and API development. From my 25 years of experience in web development and 11 years with Node.js, the most straightforward approach is to initialize a new npm project and install Express as a dependency. This method provides a clean starting point for scalable web applications.