This is a 'Hello World' node application, designed to show how to get started with stucturing your code in Node.js, using the Express framework.
It has a very basic structure, uses the http module and includes a route to serve a single webpage.
It also separates out our concerns to a basic level by separating the config, express configuration and the application routes.
Obviously, the first thing you’ll need to do is install Node.js.
Once you’ve done that, run the application by traversing to the folder in Terminal, or Command prompt, and type node index.js.
When running in development, a handy tool to install and use is Nodemon. When you make changes to your Node application, Nodemon restarts your Node application automatically, rather than having to do this manually every time you make a change. When Nodemon is installed, run this example with nodemon index.js.
The application has two main files; the package.json and index.js.
This file handles the dependencies that our Node application requires to work. Any dependencies that your application relies on in production should be stored in the dependencies object in this file.
This application has a few dependencies to help it setup, such as jade which node uses as our front-end templating language, and Express, which is a web development framework for Node.
This is the base file of our Node application and is the file we call when we run node index.js. This file 'requires' other modules and dependencies in our application and so is the entry point into our application code.
The rest of the application is structured simply to what I consider to be logical convention.
Front-end related code (such as CSS and JS) is stored in the public folder, while application modules we write should be in the app and core folders.
I’ve included a simple Grunt setup that if run with grunt watch will automatically compile your CSS and JS for you.
This setup is taken from a front-end framework I help maintain called Kickoff – if you want to see how Grunt or any of this setup works, check out Kickoff’s documentation.
If you’re new to Node, or vastly experienced with it, I’d love to hear your feedback.
Likewise, if you have any problems running the application, get in touch or raise an issue.