Building a node.js app using Express & Socket.IO
Here are some notes for my node.js workshop that you can use to follow along during and after the talk. Together, we’ll build the server-side portion of a simple app called UserSpy using two popular node.js frameworks: express and socket.io.
Prerequisites
-
The very first thing you’ll want to do is install node.js on your local machine. Click the Download button on the website and choose the correct package for your platform.
-
Ensure installation was successful by running
node -v
in a terminal. It should print out the version of node installed. -
When developing node apps, you’ll need to restart the app after every change. To automate this, install nodemon:
sudo npm install nodemon -g
From now on, instead of running apps using
node
you can usenodemon
to get the auto-restart functionality.
Grab the project
-
Make a clone of the userspy repository:
git clone https://github.com/ammmir/userspy
cd userspy
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Although node has a rich core API, there are thousands of modules available at the official npm registry. A node app declares its module dependencies in a file called package.json. Use
npm
(included in your node installation) to install them:npm install
-
Finally, run the app:
nodemon server.js
If you followed all the steps above, you’ll see something like this:
5 Jun 15:11:57 - [nodemon] v0.6.12
5 Jun 15:11:57 - [nodemon] watching: /Users/amir/src/userspy
5 Jun 15:11:57 - [nodemon] starting `node server.js`
UserSpy server started.
Now we’re ready to start coding :)