Setting up the project

I’m going to try out the mean.io tool for scaffolding and managing this demo.

    sudo npm -g install mean-cli
    mean init kueDemo
    cd kueDemo 
    npm install
    bower install

Some interesting things happen here:

mean init kueDemo clones the github project for mean.io into this folder
npm install runs bower automatically, although the docs indicate that this doesn’t always happen, so run bower anyway to be sure.

Since I now had 2 git repositories nested, I removed the link to mean.io by running

    git remote rm upstream
    rm -fr .git
    cd ..
    git add kueDemo

I’m sure there’s a better way of doing this (that e.g. keeps the link to mean.io as a remote), but I couldn’t figure it out. I think if the mean.io script did a fetch rather than a clone, this might have been easier.

Maybe I can re-add the mean.io as a remote in future and fetch from it to keep the library up to date, I’m not sure.

Installing dev dependencies

One of the dependencies causes an out-of-memory failure on npm. If you go npm install --dev, you run out of memory, at least on a 8GB system.

Checking the basic install

Start Mongo: mkdir /tmp/kueDemo && mongod --dbpath /tmp/kueDemo --smallfiles.

The --smallfiles option doesn’t use as much disk space, but is less efficient.
Run gulp to run the default task
Open a browser at http://localhost:3000 and you should see the basic scaffolding

Default mean.io app

Looking around

The basic folder structure is pretty deep, so here’s a quick summary:

Folder	Filename	Description	Comment
root	gulpfile	The task runner definition file	Hardly need to modify, if ever; customisation will happen in the gulp/*.js files
	bower.json
	package.json
	karma.conf.js	Karma test config file	Looks pretty comprehensive. Can probably leave alone; maybe add more browsers
	mean.js	No idea at this point
	server.js	Fires the app up	Usually don’t need to touch
config	*.js	one config file for each type of environment	Pretty intuitive as to what you need to edit here
config/middlewares		No idea at this point
gulp	*.js	Gulp task definitions; per environment	Some customisation will probably be needed; e.g. adding less, moving to jade
packages		This is where the magic happens
packages/custom		User-generated modules go here	use `mean package <PKG_NAME>` to scaffold packages. For god’s sake, don’t try create them from scratch
packages/custom/MY_PACKAGGE	app.js	Auto-generated.	Usually don’t need to touch

Mocha Test bug

Two days of frustration to figure this out. The mocha tests weren’t running in the mean.io app

The problem lies with the relative paths used to both

glob the model paths
glob the unit tests

The fix:

Changing the ../packages/... paths to ./packages/... in gulp/test.js sorts out 2 and partly 1.

But now the packages won’t load in require, so You also need to add a few lines in function walk in node_modules/meanio/lib/core_modules/module/util as follows:

 function walk(wpath, type, excludeDir, callback) {
   // regex - any chars, then dash type, 's' is optional, with .js or .coffee extension, case-insensitive
   // e.g. articles-MODEL.js or mypackage-routes.coffee
   var rgx = new RegExp('(.*)-' + type + '(s?).(js|coffee)$', 'i');
   if (!fs.existsSync(wpath)) return;
   fs.readdirSync(wpath).forEach(function(file) {
     var newPath = path.join(wpath, file);
     var stat = fs.statSync(newPath);
     if (stat.isFile() && (rgx.test(file) || (baseRgx.test(file)) && ~newPath.indexOf(type))) {
       var realPath = fs.realpathSync(newPath);                //New line here
       callback(realPath);                                     //Modified line here
     } else if (stat.isDirectory() && file !== excludeDir && ~newPath.indexOf(type)) {
       walk(newPath, type, excludeDir, callback);
     }
   });
 }

Now the tests run:

  27 passing (7s)

In Part 2, we’ll start with some actual coding.