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)

Connecting to MongoDB through Mongoose

Mongoose is a popular object document mapper (ODM) for Node.js that provides a natural interface for working with MongoDB documents, collections, and databases. You can think of Mongoose as a superset of MongoDB functionality that is tailored to work inside Node.js. We will use Mongoose for all the details of connecting to MongoDB, defining our model schemas, and retrieving documents. One of the strengths Mongoose shares with Express is its very lightweight, flexible, and compossible approach to database queries.

Getting ready

To use Mongoose, we will need to install it to our Express application's package.json file:

npm install mongoose --save

Once saved to our package.json file...