Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By : Nicholas McClay
Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By: Nicholas McClay

Overview of this book

The MEAN Stack is a framework for web application development using JavaScript-based technologies; MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js. If you want to expand your understanding of using JavaScript to produce a fully functional standalone web application, including the web server, user interface, and database, then this book can help guide you through that transition. This book begins by configuring the frontend of the MEAN stack web application using the Angular JavaScript framework. We then implement common user interface enhancements before moving on to configuring the server layer of our MEAN stack web application using Express for our backend APIs. You will learn to configure the database layer of your MEAN stack web application using MongoDB and the Mongoose framework, including modeling relationships between documents. You will explore advanced topics such as optimizing your web application using WebPack as well as the use of automated testing with the Mocha and Chai frameworks. By the end of the book, you should have acquired a level of proficiency that allows you to confidently build a full production-ready and scalable MEAN stack application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Using Express Web Server

Even if a web application is a single-page application (SPA), we will very likely need a backend web server to serve the SPA files and secure API services for our SPA. In this chapter, we will examine recipes to set up an Express.js web server as the backend for our MEAN stack web application. We will cover how to add routing for our server and serve our Angular application and other common backend needs, such as logging and handling cookies.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • Creating a new Express project with express-generator
  • Working with routes in Express
  • Serving an Angular web application with Express
  • Working with headers in Express
  • Working with cookies in Express
  • Creating Express middleware for routes
  • Logging traffic and activity with Morgan
  • Running your Express web server with Forever
  • Securing your Express web server
...