Node Mongo Starter

The main purpose of this repository is to show a good end-to-end project setup and workflow for writing Node code with mongodb.

Pre-reqs

To build and run this app locally you will need a few things:

• Install Node.js
• Install MongoDB
• Install VS Code

Getting started

• Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ashishkumar3/node-mongo-starter.git <project_name>

• Install dependencies

cd <project_name>
npm install

• Run the project

npm start

Finally, navigate to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the template being served and rendered locally!

• Create a cloud database - For local development, running MongoDB on localhost is fine, however once we deploy we need a database with high availability. The easiest way to achieve this is by using a managed cloud database. There are many different providers, but the easiest one to get started with is MongoLab.

Building the project

It is rare for JavaScript projects not to have some kind of build pipeline these days, however Node projects typically have the least amount build configuration. Because of this I've tried to keep the build as simple as possible. If you're concerned about compile time, the main watch task takes ~2s to refresh.

Running the build

All the different build steps are orchestrated via npm scripts. Npm scripts basically allow us to call (and chain) terminal commands via npm. This is nice because most JavaScript tools have easy to use command line utilities allowing us to not need grunt or gulp to manage our builds. If you open package.json, you will see a scripts section with all the different scripts you can call. To call a script, simply run npm run <script-name> from the command line. You'll notice that npm scripts can call each other which makes it easy to compose complex builds out of simple individual build scripts. Below is a list of all the scripts this template has available:

Npm Script	Description
start	Does the same as 'npm run serve'. Can be invoked with npm start

Dependencies

Dependencies are managed through package.json. In that file you'll find two sections:

dependencies

Package	Description
bcryptjs	Library for hashing and salting user passwords.
bluebird	Promise library
body-parser	Express 4 middleware.
dotenv	Loads environment variables from .env file.
express	Node.js web framework.
express-session	Express 4 middleware.
express-validator	Easy form validation for Express.
mongoose	MongoDB ODM.
nodemailer	Node.js library for sending emails.

| ejs | Template engine for Express. |

devDependencies

Package	Description
concurrently	Utility that manages multiple concurrent tasks. Used with npm scripts
jest	Testing library for JavaScript.
node-sass	Allows to compile .scss files to .css
nodemon	Utility that automatically restarts node process when it crashes

To install or update these dependencies you can use npm install or npm update.