api-overview.md

purpose: Comprehensive overview of microservices blog/forum API system type: API language: JavaScript/Node.js dependencies: Express.js, JWT, Joi, Helmet, CORS, Rate-Limiting last-updated: 2025-08-15 The Microservices Blog/Forum API is a distributed system designed for scalable content management. The architecture separates concerns into independent services: Posts Service for content creation and retrieval, Comments Service for discussion management, and Authentication Service for user security. Each service operates independently with RESTful APIs, enabling horizontal scaling and technology stack flexibility. 4000 Blog post creation, retrieval, editing, and deletion PostgreSQL/MongoDB /posts, /posts/:id 4001 Comment management, moderation, threading PostgreSQL/MongoDB /posts/:postId/comments 4002 User authentication, authorization, session management PostgreSQL/Redis /auth/login, /auth/register, /auth/refresh 3000 User interface, API consumption, state management React 18, Axios, Bootstrap HTTP REST with API keys Internal network, service authentication 5000ms HTTP REST with JWT tokens CORS, rate limiting, input validation 10000ms JWT (JSON Web Tokens) 15 minutes (access), 7 days (refresh) OAuth 2.0/OIDC (Google, GitHub, Discord) HTTP-only cookies for refresh tokens Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) admin, moderator, user create_post, edit_post, delete_post, moderate_comments Users can only edit/delete their own content Invalid input data, validation failures {"error": "Validation failed", "details": [validation_errors]} Missing or invalid authentication token {"error": "Authentication required"} Insufficient permissions for requested operation {"error": "Insufficient permissions"} Requested resource does not exist {"error": "Resource not found"} Rate limit exceeded {"error": "Rate limit exceeded", "retryAfter": seconds} Unexpected server-side failures {"error": "Internal server error"} http://localhost:4000 http://localhost:4001 http://localhost:4002 http://localhost:3000 https://api.yourdomain.com/posts https://api.yourdomain.com/comments https://api.yourdomain.com/auth https://yourdomain.com Docker with multi-stage builds Docker Compose (development), Kubernetes (production) nginx, HAProxy, or cloud load balancers PostgreSQL with read replicas Redis for session storage and rate limiting Prometheus, Grafana, structured logging URL-based versioning (/api/v1/, /api/v2/) v1 6 months notice with Sunset headers Maintained for one major version