/chatty-day-two-mini

Primary LanguageJavaScript

##Day 2: Refactor with Express

###Step 1: Install Express Let's install Express to get started.

npm install --save express

This saves express to your package.json

Now we need to require express and instantiate it. To get familiar with express, get familiar with the guide.

How would setting up a server be different from setting up a server in Node?

There are three steps to setting up an express server:

  • Require the express library: var express = require('express');
  • Instantiate the express app: var app = express();
  • Have the app listen on a port: app.listen(9001);

###Step 2: Create GET endpoint

In express, listening on endpoints is as easy as calling get or post on the app itself. For example:

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
	res.send(JSON.stringify(messages));
});

Pretty cool right?

Now create your `get endpoint for your server.js

###Step 3: Create POST endpoint

Remember all of the crappy code we had to write to get POST data? Express and body-parser make this a lot simpler.

  • Install body-parser as a npm module. See the express install command above for reference
  • Require body-parser in your server.js, assign it to a variable called bodyParser
  • Make a POST endpoint that will look very much like your GET, but that reads req.body to get the message data.
  • In order to get the POST data without using .on('data') and .on('end'), we'll use bodyParser:
app.use(bodyParser.json());

bodyParser is middleware, meaning it runs before every request. It automatically parses the body of requests and puts it together in a nice req.body property.

  • finish your POST endpoint by grabbing the req.body and adding the messages to your messages array

Your server.js might look something like this when it's done: https://gist.github.com/cahlan/7027611

###Step 4: Refactor header writing into middlware

Let's create our own middleware to deal with headers.

app.use(function(req, res, next) {
 //middleware goes here
});

Anything that runs in the above function will happen before every request is processed. It's a great place to put header modification.

Use your own custom middleware to add the appropriate headers to your server.js. It should look something like this: https://gist.github.com/jacob-israel-turner/3ccb040963cb7f59acb2