MVC Starter

Getting set up

Change into a directory of your choosing
Run git clone or download the ZIP from GitHub repo
Run npm install

Example

$ cd projects
$ git clone https://github.com/weschang15/mvc-starter.git someProject
$ npm install

Where to start

Once all dependencies are installed you may run a setup script of your choosing. Want to use MySQL and Sequelize?

$ npm run setup:mysql

Feel like using MongoDB with Mongoose instead? (this script is not yet complete...)

$ npm run setup:mongo

Both of these scripts will configure environment variables for you located in .env at the root of the project. You must provide a value for these.

App.js

The app.js file is where Express is configured. This file sets up Express with a body-parser, cookie-parser, and a MYSQL session store as well as beginner set of API routes and a simple custom error handler middleware.

Start.js

The start.js file is what executes the application, loads in dotenv and runs the server. This file will be untouched for the most part.

Best Practices

Routing

All throughout this starter kit, you'll find index.js files. These files are meant for Group Exporting. This means that instead of requiring individual files, you can imply require a single index file and destructure what you need from there. See below for an example of how routing is done...

// testRoutes.js
const test = require("express").Router();
const testController = require("../../controllers");
test.get("/", testController.get);

module.exports = test;
// end testRoutes.js

// index.js
const testRoutes = require("./testRoutes");
const otherRoutes = require("./otherRoutes");

module.exports = { testRoutes, otherRoutes };
// end index.js

// app.js
const { testRoutes } = require("./routes/api");

app.use("/api/v1/test", testRoutes);

This process should also be done for your controllers. If you are using Sequelize, this is essentially what the models/index.js file does behind the scenes.

weschang15 / mvc-starter