rayfoster14/expressjs-introduction

ExpressJS introduction

Install

Install as you would any NodeJS application.

1. Make sure NodeJS and npm are installed. Run node -v and npm -v in the command line to ensure they have installed correctly.
2. Clone this repository and navigate to it in your command line
3. Run npm install at the root repo's directory
4. Run node server.js to start the server.
5. Navigate to http://localhost:3000 on machine it's running on or http://some.ip.address:3000 for internal network devices.

Introduction

All of the exciting ExpressJS stuff can be foundi in server.js. This is where we can interact with the PC, files, databases.etc. This is not client facing so it's a more secure way of dealing with credentials, or informaiton you don't want exposed, or edit and create files.etc

ExpressJS in this example is serving the public folder, that means that the public folder will be working as if it's the root of the site, to the web browser. We can define custom endpoints in the server.js.

In public/script.js, I have made a GET and a POST call to the ExpressJS server. These calls can be cross referenced in server.js to see what they are doing.

ExpressJS can be ran in the background using special programs like PM2. This will keep the port open and restart the script if an error occurs.