Slightly different one this today. We will be looking at the Express framework in a little more depth. I’ve been learning NodeJS for a little while and found it to actually be more useful in day-to-day work than the client-based Javascript!
I needed to get my hands dirty with an actual project but didn’t know what to build 🤦♂️(or rather I found I had too many ideas!).
So instead I thought I would try to build a vanilla ‘generic’ starter app that could quickly be customized to become any sort of app I have an idea for. My starter project quickly became very messy and most likely isn’t a great starting point for a nice clean fresh app.
But one of the difficult things I find is when frameworks ‘abstract’ a lot of stuff into one method and you don’t really know what it does really.
Anyhow, the focus, for now, is Express apps…
Note to self: Express has a starter project: http://expressjs.com/en/starter/generator.html
So starting from absolute basics, load the node modules in to your script:
//Install Express
const express = require("express");
const app = express();
First, you need to install the node modules via the terminal:
npm install express
Then you can use express in the app. But there are a couple of other dependencies you probably need too:
//API
const bodyParser = require("body-parser");
const router = express.Router();
Simple routing, to clarify express abstracts all the fin technical stuff from HTTP routing, which would could just do with the node native HTTP module, into nice clean methods:
More info: https://nodejs.dev/learn/making-http-requests-with-nodejs
So I didn’t get into any methods just yet, but other posts will take a deeper dive! 👨🎓