Project Awesome UI and Backend based on node.js on Heroku

Getting Started

To get started with this code, you need to set up a few things first. This list may not be complete; we'll add to it, as we discover things that are missing.

At a minimum, you'll need to set up your development environment with:

• The Heroku toolbelt for working with Node.js (follow the tutorial at heroku.com)
• This includes, at least, git, node, and npm
• For running and testing locally, you'll also need Postgres. See: http://www.postgresql.org/download/

After forking the repo, you need to run npm install from the root directory. This will install various node.js modules as specified in package.json. This includes, among other things:

• mocha, which is a test framework for node
• passport, which is used for authenticating against Facebook, Google, etc. for logins
• sequelize, which provides a database abstraction layer

To be able to run tests locally, you may also need to do:

sudo npm install mocha -g

To see if that worked, try typing mocha at the command line. You should see something like this:

169-231-89-105:awesome-ui-backend-node-heroku pconrad$ mocha


  0 passing (3ms)

169-231-89-105:awesome-ui-backend-node-heroku pconrad$ 

Setting up your environment variables

Define:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres@localhost/postgres

A bit of Postgres

• psql is the command to get into the postgres command line
• \l lists databases

Reading List

Subject	What it is	Where to learn more
Node.js	Server-side JavaScript	https://nodejs.org/
Heroku	Hosting for webapps	http://www.heroku.com
Bootstrap	Javascript client-side framework	http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/
Selenium	Test framework for browser interactions	http://www.seleniumhq.org/
Travis-CI	Continous Integration Framework	https://travis-ci.org/
Passport	Authentication for node.js apps	http://passportjs.org/
PostgreSQL	SQL database that works with Heroku	http://www.postgresql.org/
Browserify	node.js npm modules in client side code	https://github.com/substack/browserify-handbook

What Unit testing framework is best for node.js?

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7254025/node-js-unit-testing
• http://unitjs.com/
• http://mochajs.org/
• others?

Contributors

• Phil Conrad
• Martin Wolfenbarger