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

What the is production environment?


The system on which we develop our app is the development environment or platform—the system could be your personal laptop or desktop. Apart from development, we may use such a system for browsing, sending e-mails, image editing, playing games, listening to music, watching movies, and so on. We would not host our app on such a system, would we?

When we are ready to share our app with the world, the recommended and common practice is to use a dedicated system for hosting it, which may or may not be shared by other apps.

So how does Express know it is in the production environment?

Express looks up the NODE_ENV environment variable to determine the environment it is in. If the environment variable is not defined, it assumes it as a development environment.

Note

For more information about NODE_ENV and the various modes of Express, refer to the Express in different environments section in Chapter 2, Your First Express App.

What changes in production mode?

When Express...