flock

Provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you quick and organized way to start developing of flock based web apps with useful modules like mongoose and passport pre-bundled and configured. We mainly try to take care of the connection points between existing popular frameworks and solve common integration problems.

Prerequisites

• It's recommends to use an IDE to make your development process seamless. You may use licence products download of WebStrom (http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/)
• Node.js - Download and Install Node.js. You can also follow this gist for a quick and easy way to install Node.js and npm
• MongoDB - Download and Install MongoDB - Make sure it's running on the default port (27017).
• Install GIT executable from http://git-scm.com/downloads.

Additional Packages

• Express - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
• Mongoose - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
• Passport - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
• AngularJS - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.
• Twitter Bootstrap - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.
• UI Bootstrap - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.

Quick Install

The quickest way to get started with flock is to clone the project and utilize it like this:

Install dependencies:

$ npm install
$ npm install bower -g
$ bower install

We recommend using Grunt to start the server:

$ grunt

When not using grunt you can use:

$ node server

Then open a browser and go to:

http://localhost:8000

Configuration

All configuration is specified in the config folder, particularly the config.js file. Here you will need to specify your application name, database name, as well as hook up any social app keys if you want integration with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub or Google.

Environmental Settings

There are three environments provided by default, development, test, and production. Each of these environments has the following configuration options:

• db - This is the name of the MongoDB database to use, and is set by default to dev for the development environment.
• root - This is determined automatically at the start of this file, but can be overridden here.
• app.name - This is the name of your app or website, and can be different for each environment. You can tell which environment you are running by looking at the TITLE attribute that your app generates.
• Social Registration - Facebook, GitHub, Google, Twitter. You can specify your own social accounts here for each social platform, with the following for each provider:
  • clientID
  • clientSecret
  • callbackURL

To run with a different environment, just specify NODE_ENV as you call grunt:

$ NODE_ENV=test grunt

If you are using node instead of grunt, it is very similar:

$ NODE_ENV=test node server

NOTE: Running Node.js applications in the production environment enables caching, which is disabled by default in all other environments.

Getting Started

We pre-included an article example, check it out:

• The Model - Where we define our object schema.
• The Controller - Where we take care of our backend logic.
• NodeJS Routes - Where we define our REST service routes.
• AngularJs Routes - Where we define our CRUD routes.
• The AngularJs Service - Where we connect to our REST service.
• The AngularJs Controller - Where we take care of our frontend logic.
• The AngularJs Views Folder - Where we keep our CRUD views.