Over the past few weeks, I've been working on a project to show students at Princeton how to build and deploy a Node.js application.
My intent was to focus on the build part of it – for students and solo developers, deployment should be as invisible and painless as possible. As such, I build a tiny web app – step by step – that starts from the "hello, world" you've already seen a thousand times and builds it into something more functional.
Basically, it's the guide to building a real app (not just "hello, world") I wish I'd had when I started learning Node.js.
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step-by-step-express
Step-by-step evolution of a lightweight Express web app that will serve XKCD comics
Step by Step Express
The intent of this project is to take you step-by-step through the process of building an Express app, documenting the changes as bite-sized chunks that you'll ideally be able to pick up and iterate upon rapidly.
Step Zero
- Initalize the repo with the universal documents that we should have in every project
Read more in the Step Zero README.md
Step One
- Set up a very basic HTTP server + add the dependencies
To run the Step One code:
# make sure your current working directory is the main directory of this repo
cd step-one
node app.js
Read more in the Step One README.md
Step Two
- Set up a very basic HTTP server + add the dependencies
To run the Step Two code:
# make sure your current working directory is the main directory of this repo
cd step-two
node app.js
Read more in the Step Two…
Each step in the project is its own Node.js application, with its own README.md that describes what changed from the previous step. Additionally, there's a step zero which is effectively "how to initialize a project" that often goes unsaid.
I'm thinking about building a long-form guide from this, with each step as an individual post, here on dev.to. If you'd be interested in this definitely comment or ping me on Twitter to let me know 🤗
Top comments (13)
Absolutely fantastic! Thanks for this.
No problem – glad you like it!
I'm interested as well! Thank you! :)
Definitely interested. Willing to help as well
Yay! Glad to hear you're interested 💖
I'm interested in as well
Yay! 🎉
Interested as well.....
Yay! Keep an eye out.
Just finding this? Did you write the series? If not, I think it would be a huge benefit for the community.
Count me in too :)
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