Book Image

Express Web Application Development

By : Hage Yaaapa
Book Image

Express Web Application Development

By: Hage Yaaapa

Overview of this book

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications. It provides a thin layer of features fundamental to any web application, without obscuring features that developers know and love in node.js. "Express Web Application Development" is a comprehensive guide for those looking to learn how to use the Express web framework for web application development. Starting with the initial setup of the Express web framework, "Express Web Application Development" helps you to understand the fundamentals of the framework. By the end of "Express Web Application Development", you will have acquired enough knowledge and skills to create production-ready Express apps. All of this is made possible by the incremental introduction of more advanced topics, starting from the very essentials. On the way to mastering Express for application development, we teach you the more advanced topics such as routes, views, middleware, forms, sessions, cookies and various other aspects of configuring an Express application. Jade; the recommended HTML template engine, and Stylus; the CSS pre-processor for Express, are covered in detail. Last, but definitely not least, Express Web Application Development also covers practices and setups that are required to make Express apps production-ready.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Express Web Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using a configuration file


We actually don't need to use an .ini file for configuring our apps, as shown in a previous example. The purpose of the example was just to show you how to use a Node module, not the recommended practice.

As a side effect of how require() works, Node supports JSON-based configuration files by default. Create a file with a JSON object describing the configurations, save it with a .json extension, and then load it in the app file using require().

Note

It is important to ensure that the file extension is .json and the JSON object confirms to the JSON specification, or else it will throw an error.

Here is an example of a JSON-based config file:

{
  "development": {
    "db_host": "localhost",
    "db_user": "root",
    "db_pass": "root"
  },

  "production": {
    "db_host": "192.168.1.9",
    "db_user": "myappdb",
    "db_pass": "!p4ssw0rd#"
  }
}

This is how you would load it:

var config = require('./config.json')[app.get('env')];

Now the environment-specific configuration...