In a previous post, I created a "Hello, world" with node.js.

Now, I'm going to do something a bit more substantial. I'm going to see if I can get a website running on node.js with the Express.js framework.

Why Express? Because it's the "E" in all those "*EAN" stacks (e.g. CEAN: Couchbase-Express-Angular-Node). One of my former coworkers suggest that I also try the hapi framework, which I just might do. Later.

Okay. On to Express. I already have node and npm installed (though it looks like I have a pretty old version; maybe I will update soon).

The first thing I did was to use npm to install the express-generator. This isn't strictly required, but it seems like roughly the equivalent of "File->New->MVC" in Visual Studio. I believe this only needs to be done once, and not for every project. In Powershell:

npm install express-generator -g

The -g makes it global, so I don't have to install it again to start a new project the next time.

Then, still in Powershell, I pick a root folder (I call mine "zproj", maybe you call yours "work" or "projects" or something). To kick off express generator, I enter:

express hello-express

This creates a subfolder called hello-express. I go into that folder and enter:

npm install

I'm not exactly sure, but I think this is roughly the equivalent of a NuGet package restore.

The express generator creates a couple of "routes" out of the box for me (this seems to be roughly equivalent to an ASP.NET MVC Controller). There's an 'index' and there's a 'users'. To kick off the site, I enter:

npm start

If you look in package.json, you'll see that "npm start" is a kind of shortcut for "node ./bin/www". This will spin up a web server on localhost, port 3000. When I visit that in a browser, I see this:

And that's that. What's next? Maybe I'll play around with Express and try to wire it up to Couchbase. Or maybe I'll try to get this working in a Docker container. Or maybe I'll try hapi. Or maybe I'll try updating the version of node I have and see how that goes.

By the way, what I showed you here is pretty much lifted directly from the getting started guide on expressjs.com.