Mean Courses

This project has been developed in 2015 for the purpose of studying the MEAN stack and is not maintained anymore. Some libraries are being updated using the Dependabot and Snyk.io services, but no further tests are being done.

Simple course application developed using the MEAN Stack. In this application, you can log in and create new users, manage these users using an Admin account and create and view the courses.

This project is a web application developed for didactic purposes, being its main objective to study the MEAN Stack(MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js) and related technologies.

Used technologies

Although this project is a simple application, many technologies were used to develop it.

And the main were:

Client-side

• AngularJS - the frontend part of the MEAN stack used to extend the HTML vocabulary for the application using a MV* architecture.
• Bootstrap - a front end web framework used to help create web apps in a faster and easier way.

Server-side

• Node.js - an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side Web applications.
• Express - a Node.js web application server framework, designed for building single-page, multi-page, and hybrid web application
• Jade - a terse language for writing HTML templates.
• Stylus - a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS.
• Passport - a authentication middleware for Node.js. Used to create the login interface in the server.
• Mongoose - MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.

Database

• MongoDB - a cross-platform document-oriented NoSQL database.

Testing

• Karma - a simple and flexible tool for executing JavaScript tests.
• Mocha - A test framework running on node.js and the browser which runs tests serially, mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.

Testing on Heroku

You can test this application on Heroku using this link: https://mean-courses.herokuapp.com

To log in with the admin account, use the email admin@meancourses.com and the password root.

You can also login using a default account using the email default@meancourses.com and the password default.

How to use

You need to have MongoDB installed. If you don't have it you can install the MongoDB using the official documentation.

Download and install the Node.Js using the NVM.

Install the yarn following the official documentation.

Clone the repository and install the node modules.

yarn install

Install the Bower globally:

yarn global add bower

Install the Bower components:

bower install

After this, you can run the application.

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Running the application

If you are using a Linux machine use the terminal to go to the root of the project and run the command node server.js.

If you are on a Windows machine, install the bash shell. Optionally you may run server.bat. Note that after you stop your server, you must change the directory back to the root of the project.

Then navigate your browser to http://localhost:<port> to see the app running in your browser. The port may be configured in the server/config/config.js file. The default port is 3030.

Logging in

To log in, you can use the default created users admin and default using the admin@meancourses.com and the password root and the email default@meancourses.com and the password default.

You can create your user using the signup page.

Running the tests

To run the test, you need to configure your environment. To do this you need to install Karma and install all the node modules and bower components modules needed to run this application as shown above.

Unit tests

I created an article in my blog on how to configure the Karma for tests in the WebStorm IDE and how to run Unit tests that you can see in this link.

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Deploying on Heroku

This application is configured for your deployment on Heroku. First, you need to create a MongoDB database on the MongoLab site.

Creating a MongoDB database on MongoLab

To create your account and MongoDB database on MongoLab we can use follow this tutorial: Getting Started with Mongolab.

After create your database on MongoLab, you need to change the option production.db on the file server/config/config.js like this example:

production: {
        rootPath: rootPath,
        db:'mongodb://user:password@mongolab.host:port/database',
        port: process.env.PORT || 80
    }

After doing this. We can deploy.

Deploying

To deploy, you can follow this tutorial.

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For more information on Mean Stack please check out Mean.

If you have some questions about this project, please contact me and I will try to answer as quickly as possible.