Foundation

Foundation is a framework I've created, based off an old version of mean.io, to help me rapidly develop and deploy some of my own web app ideas.

Depedencies

• Node.js
• MongodDB
• NPM
• Bower
• Optional: Grunt

Quick Install

$ git clone git@github.com:mattdeluco/snap.git
$ npm install
$ grunt || node server

Structure

Foundation is broken up into client and server modules.

Server

The expressjs server functions mainly as a way to deploy the client and to provide a storage API. A server module is a subdirectory under server/ with the following files, where "Module" is the name of the module, e.g. User:

• tests/ - contains unit test files
  • ModuleXTest.js - unit test files must end in Test.js, for example "UserModelTest.js"
• ModuleModel.js - the mongoose model definition
• ModuleController.js - the controller
• ModuleAPI.js - the routes that define the API for the module

Client

The AngularJS and Twitter Bootstrap based client.

Configuration

All configuration is specified in the config folder, particularly the config.js file and the env files. 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 mean-dev for the development environment.
• 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 OAuth Keys - Facebook, GitHub, Google, Twitter. You can specify your own social application keys here for each platform:
  • 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.

Credits

Inspired and borrowed from the terrific mean.io project.