Book Image

Node Cookbook

By : David Mark Clements
Book Image

Node Cookbook

By: David Mark Clements

Overview of this book

The principles of asynchronous event-driven programming are perfect for today's web, where efficient real-time applications and scalability are at the forefront. Server-side JavaScript has been here since the 90's but Node got it right. With a thriving community and interest from Internet giants, it could be the PHP of tomorrow. "Node Cookbook" shows you how to transfer your JavaScript skills to server side programming. With simple examples and supporting code, "Node Cookbook" talks you through various server side scenarios often saving you time, effort, and trouble by demonstrating best practices and showing you how to avoid security faux pas. Beginning with making your own web server, the practical recipes in this cookbook are designed to smoothly progress you to making full web applications, command line applications, and Node modules. Node Cookbook takes you through interfacing with various database backends such as MySQL, MongoDB and Redis, working with web sockets, and interfacing with network protocols, such as SMTP. Additionally, there are recipes on correctly performing heavy computations, security implementations, writing, your own Node modules and different ways to take your apps live.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Node Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Initializing and using a session


If we want to maintain state between page requests, we use sessions. Express supplies middleware that takes much of the complexity out of managing sessions. In this recipe, we're going to use Express to make a session between a browser and server to facilitate a user login process.

Getting ready

Let's create a fresh project:

express login

This will create a new Express skeleton named login.

How to do it...

In our app.js file, we make the following changes to app.configure:

app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.use(express.methodOverride());
app.use(express.cookieParser());
app.use(express.session({secret: 'kooBkooCedoN'}));

app.use(app.router);
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
});

Sessions are dependent on cookies, so we need both cookieParser and session middleware.

Note

Express 2 to Express 3

In Express 3, we set the secret string through cookieParser instead of session:

app.use...