MEAN Stack

MEAN is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you quick and organized way to start developing of MEAN based web apps with useful modules like mongoose and passport pre-bundled and configured. We mainly try to take care of the connection points between existing popular frameworks and solve common integration problems.

Prerequisites

Node.js - Download and Install Node.js. You can also follow this gist for a quick and easy way to install Node.js and npm
MongoDB - Download and Install MongoDB - Make sure it's running on the default port (27017).

Tools Prerequisites

NPM - Node.js package manager, should be installed when you install node.js.
Bower - Web package manager, installing Bower is simple when you have npm:

$ npm install -g bower

Optional

Grunt - Download and Install Grunt.

Additional Packages

Express - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
Mongoose - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
Passport - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
AngularJS - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.
Twitter Bootstrap - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.
UI Bootstrap - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.

Quick Install

The quickest way to get started with MEAN is to install the meanio package from NPM.

Install MEAN CLI:

$ [sudo] npm install -g meanio@latest
$ mean init <myApp>
$ cd <myApp> && npm install

We recommend using Grunt to start the server:

$ grunt

When not using grunt you can use:

$ node server

Then open a browser and go to:

http://localhost:3000

Troubleshooting

During install some of you may encounter some issues, most of this issues can be solved by one of the following tips. If you went through all this and still can't solve the issue, feel free to contact us via the repository issue tracker or the links provided below.

Update NPM, Bower or Grunt

Sometimes you may find there is a weird error during install like npm's Error: ENOENT, usually updating those tools to the latest version solves the issue.

Updating NPM:

$ npm update -g npm

Updating Grunt:

$ npm update -g grunt-cli

Updating Bower:

$ npm update -g bower

Cleaning NPM and Bower cache

NPM and Bower has a caching system for holding packages that you already installed. We found that often cleaning the cache solves some troubles this system creates.

NPM Clean Cache:

$ npm cache clean

Bower Clean Cache:

$ bower cache clean

Configuration

All configuration is specified in the server/config folder, particularly the config.js file and the env files. Here you will need to specify your application name, database name, as well as hook up any social app keys if you want integration with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub or Google.

Environmental Settings

There are three environments provided by default, development, test, and production. Each of these environments has the following configuration options:

db - This is the name of the MongoDB database to use, and is set by default to mean-dev for the development environment.
app.name - This is the name of your app or website, and can be different for each environment. You can tell which environment you are running by looking at the TITLE attribute that your app generates.
Social OAuth Keys - Facebook, GitHub, Google, Twitter. You can specify your own social application keys here for each platform:
- clientID
- clientSecret
- callbackURL

To run with a different environment, just specify NODE_ENV as you call grunt:

$ NODE_ENV=test grunt

If you are using node instead of grunt, it is very similar:

$ NODE_ENV=test node server

NOTE: Running Node.js applications in the production environment enables caching, which is disabled by default in all other environments.

Getting Started

We pre-included an article example, check it out:

The Model - Where we define our object schema.
The Controller - Where we take care of our backend logic.
NodeJS Routes - Where we define our REST service routes.
AngularJs Routes - Where we define our CRUD routes.
The AngularJs Service - Where we connect to our REST service.
The AngularJs Controller - Where we take care of our frontend logic.
The AngularJs Views Folder - Where we keep our CRUD views.

Heroku Quick Deployment

Before you start make sure you have heroku toolbelt installed and an accessible mongo db instance - you can try mongohq which has an easy setup. Add the db string to the production env in server/config/env/production.js.

git init
git add .
git commit -m "initial version"
heroku apps:create
heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/mbuchetics/heroku-buildpack-nodejs-grunt.git
git push heroku master
heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production

More Information

Visit us at Linnovate.net.
Visit our Ninja's Zone for extended support.

License

The MIT License

jmiramant / mean_personal_site