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)

Working with cookies in Express

Cookies are a standard method of storing and retrieving persistent properties and values between a web server and a web application. Express contains tools out of the box to read and write cookies and sign cookies to make sure that they are genuine.

Getting ready

Let's create a user session so that we can track user behaviors as individuals. We'll also make a special route, which when hit will set our session as a special administrator role.

By default, Express installs the cookie-parser module, and we will need that for this recipe, but, in case you don't have it installed, you can do so with NPM:

npm install cookie-parser --save
...