How Do I Set Up The MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular & Node) stack on Nitrous.IO

Question

I using the upcoming weekend to check two things off of my 2013 project list:

• Give Cloud Development A Try
• Try ANGULAR.JS

My game plan is to set up the MEAN stack on Nitrous.IO and then use the stack to complete one of the many Angularjs tutorial projects available online.

Questions:

1. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has set up the MEAN stack on Nitrous or otherwise or if anyone is aware of any good blog post that go through the process for someone with little to no javascript development experience.

2. Also, if you have setup a MEAN stack are there any things you would do differently or are there any invaluable resources I should be aware of.

Some Resources I Found Useful:

I've been researching online for the past week and have uncovered some great resources, but it would be great to see what others have found or can suggest. Below are some links to some resources that I have come across that may be helpful to others:

1. Building Angular Start-up Stack - Toronto Meetup Stream
2. Egghead.io Offers some great Video tutorials on Angular
3. Google's Angular site has a wealth of info.
4. USC Linux User Group Youtube video on MEAN on Amazon AWS

Thanks in advance for any resources, insights or guidance.

Answer 1

Ok, here's how I successfully set-up the MEAN stack on Nitrous.IO.

First, many thanks to Valeri V. Karpov and his The Code Barbarian blog. In July he had a blog post titled Introduction to the MEAN Stack, Part One: Setting Up Your Tools. I primarily followed his article, only making adjustment dictated by the Nitrous cloud platform.

So here are the steps:

1. Create A Nitrous Box: Go to the Nitrous site and sign-up for an account. Please note the free account does not provide enough storage to accommodate the full MEAN Stack. You'll need at least a "Start" pricing plan - at $9.99 per month.

2. Create A Nodejs Box: Once you complete your registration and select a pricing plan, its time to create a Nodejs box. Follow the instructions on the Nitrous site. The box comes preconfigured Nodejs.

3. Install Mongodb: To install Mongodb on your box, go to the shell prompt and type: parts install mongodb You can confirm the installation was successful by typing parts start mongodb. To stop the mongodb server you type parts stop mongodb.

4. Confirm your Node & NPM Installations: Type node at the command prompt. You should see a > sign if node is installed correctly. You are now in the node shell. Type control-c to exit the shell. Type NPM at the prompt and you should see some usage information

5. Install Express: type npm install express -g The -g flag means the package will be installed so you can run it from the terminal. Note, if you are using the free box you will likely encounter errors during the Express installation as a result of you exceeded the allocated storage.

From here on you can follow Valeri's article at Step 4 Creating an ExpressJS application..

Good luck and enjoy.

Answer 2

Since you are starting on JavaScript I would suggest that you start simple. For example

1. Build a simple web site with Node.js and Express (no Angular, no Mongo).
2. Deploy it to the cloud.
3. Then add Angular and see how the structure changes when you use an MVC framework on the client side (e.g. your backend becomes a plain REST API).
4. Then, play with Node.js and Mongo probably outside your simple Node/Express/Angular app to get the hand of a NoSQL database and database access from Node.js (the fact that everything is async brings some interesting challenges for beginners)
5. Then integrate Mongo into your app.

Answer 3

Use Bitnami https://bitnami.com/stack/mean. I like it a lot, pretty simple and concise. In my case it was for Windows and it was a seamless experience