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)

Running your Express web server with Forever

Web servers, like any application, can crash unexpectedly. When developing an application, these failures are easily fixed with a quick restart. However, when running a production web application, you will need the server to quickly and easily restart itself so that your application stays functioning for as many users as possible. One common solution to this problem is using a process manager to watch your application's process and restart it if it stops.

There are many different process managers available for Express, but we will use Forever, a simple but very popular process manager.

Getting ready

Let's set up the Forever process manager to watch our Express server....