NodeJS - Express Setup

Oct 31, 2018 by TheBlogger

For this tutorial you need to have:

• NodeJS installed on your machine. Other libraries will be installed with npm as we progress with the tutorial.

• IDE/ Editor of your choice (I’ll be using Bracket).

I’ll be working from a Windows machine, so I’ll be using the command line, but this can be done from any OS. 

Let's start

Open the cmd (command line) and spin up a new NodeJS app (from the folder you want your app to be in) =>

mkdir consumer
cd consumer
npm init

your terminal/cmd will return some questions =>

name: consumer

Version:

Description: consume api

Entry point: server.js

test command:

git repository:

keywords:

author:

license: (ISC):

Is this okay? –  yes

I left some fields blank. This way, it’ll use the default option. This should generate a folder in our consumer folder (package.json)

Next we will install express and nodemon

npm install express

npm install -g nodemon

express is a NodeJS framework, and nodemon will monitor our app, and restart the server if any change is made.

Head over to the  consumer folder, and create server.js

/consumer/server.js =>

var express = require('express');
var index = require('./routes/index');
var port = 4200;
var app = express();
app.use('/', index);
app.listen(process.env.PORT || port, function()
console.log('Server started on port '+port)
});

In here, we setup our index.js file path to handle request and set our port to 4200.

Create a routes folder (in the consumer folder) and there, create an index.js file

/consumer/routes/index.js =>

var express = require('express');
var router = express.Router();
router.get('/', function(req, res, next){
   res.send('The Beginning'); 
});


module.exports = router; 

This is just a get request to return "The Beginning" to the browser.

[NB: All this setup is so we can view the json request on the browser. We can view it on the console, but I’m not so thrilled by that.]

Lets start the server. In your terminal/CMD => 

nodemon

Head over to a browser and type:  http://localhost:4200

That's all for this tutorial.

Comments