In our previous post, we talked about getting started with Mongoose and MongoDB. In this post, we’ll show you how to use Yeoman and scaffold a new Mongoose/Express project for MongoDB.
Yeoman is a scaffolding tool, that scaffolds out projects using Grunt, Bower, and Node. There are times when you end up cut and pasting boilerplate code around to create a new project. This is precisely what Yeoman does, but with a single command and a few awesome generators.
Yeoman uses Grunt as the task runner to perform run/build/test tasks. If you want to use Gulp for the same, you can check out Slush. Slush is also a Scaffolding tool but uses Gulp as the task runner.
Getting Started with Yeoman
To make our lives easy, we will be using a Super Awesome Yeoman Generator named generator-mongoose, which will help us in setting up a new project as well as help us in scaffolding schemas.
This generator uses Express.js as the server, HTML for templating and a tinge of Bootstrap CSS to make things look good.
Let’s create a new folder and name it yoMongoose. CD into the folder and run the following:
To install Yeoman:
[sudo] npm install -g yo
To install generator-mongoose:
[sudo] npm install -g generator-mongoose
and finally, to scaffold a new project, run:
yo mongoose
Fill in the question like:
[?] Database Name: (myDb) myTestDB
[?] Database Host: (localhost) localhost
[?] Database User: {hit return}
[?] Database Password: {hit return}
[?] Database Port: (27017) 27017
[?] Will you be using heroku? (Y/n) n
And Yeoman will go off and scaffold a new project for you. Your folder structure should consist of a /node_modules folder and a public/bower_components. If you do not see either of them, please run npm install and bower install.
To run the app, execute:
grunt
This will start off the express server and launch the home page in your default browser. The default page you see is a list of routes configured in the application.
Back to the folder and let’s have a quick walkthrough of the app.
-
config/db.js
Consists of the DB configs and some options you can mess around with.
-
models/post.js
An example schema of a blog post. All the other models we’re going to scaffold with the sub-generator will appear here.
-
public/
Consist of the JavaScript and CSS needed for the UI.
-
routes/ index.js
Consist of the default route that will dispatch the index.html post.js, and consists of 5 key endpoints you’ll need to interact with the posts collection.
-
test/
Consists of the test for Post route and its methods.
-
views/
Consists of all the templates and views sent to the client.
To get a feel for where things go in a modular Express app, I recommend taking a peek at the following in order:
config/db.js models/post.js routes/post.js app.js
Once you’re done, we’ll scaffold another model named articles using the sub-generator.
Back to terminal/prompt and run:
yo mongoose:schema "article|title:String,excerpt:String,content:String,published:Boolean,created:Date"
The above command will create those 3 files and result in:
Your creating a schema for article With the fields: title,excerpt,content,published,created starting request to schematic for test mock data... create routes/article.js create models/article.js create test/test-article.js
The models/article.js will consist of all the fields listed after the pipe symbol in the command. Sweet right?
To see the result and an updated list of routes, run:
grunt
Dig into the newly generated files, and with practically zero effort, we were able to generate an Express/Mongoose app.
Hope you got a basic understanding of Scaffolding Express/Mongoose apps.
Thanks for reading. Do comment.
@arvindr21
