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

Express in different environments


In a software release process, we designate systems for development, UAT, staging, production, and so on for different stages of product release. Technically, these contexts of application execution are called environments.

It is very common that we want our software to execute differently on different environments. For example, in a development environment, we would like to see a very verbose detail about any error our software might encounter, but we might not want to do so in the production environment. Express has a very simple mechanism to let us do that. Let's find out how it works.

Express' app.get('env') method returns the current environment of the app. Based on this value, you can configure your app to use different middlewares, Node modules, and so on; effectively changing the behavior of the app based on the environment.

Before we go about configuring our app based on its environment, let's find out how app.get('env') works.

When an Express app starts...