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)

Creating a new Express project with express-generator

Very similar to Angular-CLI, there is a command line tool to quickly create a new Express project called express-generator. We will use express-generator to create a new Express web server project to serve as the back-end of our blog application. We will eventually integrate this back-end web server with our front-end Angular project to create a full-stack JavaScript web application.

Getting ready

First, we will need to install both Express and express-generator with NPM. If you haven't already, you will also need to install the latest version of Node.js and NPM package manager:

npm install -g express express-generator
...