Starting point for an Express 4.x project

Setup

git clone https://github.com/moudy/expressjs-base new-project
cd new-project
rm -rf .git
npm install

Live example on Heroku. Remember to run heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production when deploying fo the first time.

App Initialization

1. app.js is the entery point for the app. The Express app is created here
2. In development/testing environments dotenv loads .env.development and .env.testing
3. config/boot.js gets called passing in app instance
   1. Some basic settings are added to app (port, title, view engine, etc.)
   2. config/initializers/* are called. This is where you can add other setup code like passport configuration
   3. Some basic middleware is defined
   4. Map config/routes.js and use router as middleware
4. connect to Database by requiring config/db.js
5. Start app with app.listen()

Routing

Routes are defined in config/routes.js. See Project Router for more info.

module.exports = function () {
  this.get('/', 'pages/index');
};

Views

Views are located in app/views. express-handlebars is used as the view engine. Despite it's name it works fine with Express 4. The view engine is configured in config/view. Handlebars is passed into the express3-handlebars module so you can be sure which version of handlebars you are using. This can be important if you also want to use handlebars on the client.

Assets (development)

SASS + Browserify. Images referenced in CSS are converted to Base64 strings. Assets are served using Broccoli as middleware. See Brocfile.js for configuration.

Assets (production)

A postinstall script builds fingerprinted and gziped assets into assets/ using Broccoli. You can optionally provide some AWS credentials as environment variables and script/deploy-assets will deploy the assets to an S3 bucket. Make sure to specify the bucketname and change the asset host in config/environments/production.js. The asset-url handlebars helper (in lib/handlebars-helpers.js) takes care of the url re-writing based on the asset host and fingerprint.

Testing

A basic starting point for mocha tests in test/

Models

Should go in app/models/. config/db.js and test/helpers assumes the use of MongoDB/MongooseJS but can be easily swapped out if that's not right for the application.