MEAN Stack Demo

MEAN (MongoDb + Express + Angular + Node) is an end-to-end technology stack for HTML/JavaScript applications.

This is the code that accompanied a presentation on the MEAN stack to the SFHTML users group on Oct 30 2014.

Copyright (c) 2014 Alicia Liu, Matt Green, and Ward Bell

License: MIT

Link to presentation videos

Slides for MEAN overview and Node/Express

Slides for Mongo Talk

Slides for Angular talk

Prerequisites

You must have node installed. The application can run with its in-memory database ... but then you'd only be looking at the EAN stack :-)

Install MongoDb in order to run the app with the MongoDb database.

Nodemon and node-inspector are two handy node runners; they are not required.

Run it

This app requires three servers

• MongoDb database server
• backend data server
• frontend server for the client-side app and its assets

Start them separately.

Start the MongoDb server

Much depends upon your development environment. Assuming that the mongod command is available, the following may work for you:

• open a terminal/command window
• change directory to the root of the project
• mongod --dbpath database

The last step launches the MongoDb server, pointing it (via --dbpath) to the "database" directory under the project root as the place to put the app database.

Start the backend data server

• open a terminal or command window
• open a terminal or command window
• go to the backend directory
• run npm install
• choose to run either with the in-memory db or with mongo

  • in-mem:

      npm start
      node bin/www
      nodemon bin/www           (auto-restarts node)
      node-debug bin/www        (under node-inspector)
    

  • mongo:

      env MONGO=1 npm start
      node bin/www mongo
      nodemon bin/www  mongo    (auto-restarts node)
      node-debug bin/www mongo  (under node-inspector)
    

The terminal window tells you that the server is running and in which mode (in-mem or mongo).

You can try the GET apis in a browser. localhost:4567 presents an "API test page" with sample links such as:

http://localhost:4567/api/questions
http://localhost:4567/api/questions?limit=3
http://localhost:4567/api/questions/summaries
http://localhost:4567/api/questions/summaries?sort=votes&limit=5
http://localhost:4567/api/questions/5448b56b57675cbc246e6dbd

You'll have to use a tool like curl to try the POST methods.

We think the Postman chrome plugin is a great API exploration tool. We've made it easy for you by preparing some requests in a Postman json file.

Import those requests as follows:

• Open Postman
• Click the Collections button
• Click the inbox icon
• Drag backend/Postman_MEAN_Demo.json onto the dialog box

You should see a new collection called "MEAN Demo". Have fun.

Start the frontend server

This section of the code is a separate static site that consumes the data API created in backend.

You can run it by serving up the assets in frontend/app in a simple HTTP server, such as http-server.

npm install http-server -g # one-time only
cd frontend/app
http-server -p 3000 # default port is 8080

Now you can access the demo at http://localhost:3000

Directory Structure

The following is a quick orientation to the salient structural features of this application

/backend                  - the node-express-mongo data server
   /bin/www               - the launch point for the server
   /dataservice           - the in-memory and MongoDb data services
   /public                - static client assets ... there are none as this is a data server
   /routes                - the router for the data api
   API Requirements.md    - the "original" requirements for the data api
   app.js                 - the express server
   Postman_MEAN_Demo.json - Postman request collection, helpful in api exploration
   Tutorial.md            - How to build the backend from scratch

/frontend                 - the client application written with angular 
   /app
       app.js             - the root application module
       /scripts           - application JavaScript
           /controllers   - control view presentation
           /directives
           /services      - access the data service
       /views             - HTML templates w/ Angular markup