Repo: https://github.com/neelkrishna/car-maintenance
Welcome to Knowledge Collisions! This is the first of many parts of a Node/Angular 2 tutorial in which we will create a fully-functional car maintenance log.
Most of you have likely built or worked with a NodeJs/ExpressJs server, but if you haven’t, that’s ok! This part of the tutorial will explain how to build your server, and what each block of code does – I think it’s helpful to know your code at this level, rather than starting with a seed project. Let’s begin!
Step 1: Create your package file
Create a directory called car-maintenance, and inside it, another one called server-car-maintenance. Navigate inside server-car-maintenance on your command line. Run:
npm init
A wizard will walk you through creating a package.json file for your new NodeJs application. You can allow the wizard to enter default values for each attribute by pressing enter.
Step 2: Add some crucial dependencies
Add important dependencies to your project by running the following command inside server-car-maintenance:
npm install express --save
npm install morgan --save
npm install mysql --save
npm install path --save
npm install jade --save
- Express is a web application framework for node that allows us to create a REST API. More on that later.
- Morgan is a logging tool we’ll use to debug as needed.
- We will be using a mySQL database to store our data.
- Path allows us to load data or dependencies from file paths, as we’ll need to do later.
- Jade is an HTML templating engine.
We will add more dependencies as we find a need for them.
Step 3: Create index.js
Create a file called index.js directly inside server-car-maintenance. This file will define all of your other files and packages for the node compiler. *This file is often also called server.js, or app.js*.
Inside index.js, first add four of the dependencies we have installed:
var express = require('express');
var logger = require('morgan');
var mysql = require('mysql');
var path = require('path');
Initiallize logging:
app.use(logger('dev'));
Add an error handler. This will make sure that a stacktrace is printed when an error occurs in your dev environment:
// development error handler
if (app.get('env') === 'development') {
app.use(function(err, req, res, next) {
res.status(err.status || 500);
res.render('error', {
message: err.message,
error: err
});
});
}
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