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 unit tests for Node.js using the Mocha testing library

The base of our testing pyramid is made of unit tests. These tests are highly componentized, individual functionality tests that simply ensure that a unit of code, such as a route or some middleware, conforms to its expected API and handles failure cases as expected. Unit tests don't generally rely on other aspects of our application, and rely on extensive mocking of application states and data structures to test functionality instead. Testing individual methods and business logic in our application, such as our Express application middleware, makes for great unit tests.

Getting ready

Let's explore how to apply unit testing using the popular Mocha and...