Ironhack Express application generator.

Introduction

iron-generator is Ironhack's NPM package that allows students to quickly create express projects. The Iron-generator is strongly opinionated:

• Follows industry best practices
• Predefined directory structure:
  • public: Public Assets folder (css, js, images)
  • models: Mongoose Schemas and models
  • routes: Project routes
  • views: Project views and layouts
• Views Template: Handlebars
• CSS Engine: SCSS - Node-sass-middleware
• ORM: Mongoose
• Comes prepopulated with popular, useful Express middlewares
  • Logger: morgan
  • Favicon: serve-favicon
  • HTTP POST Params: body-parser
  • Cookies: cookie-parser
• Error handling: 404 (Not found), 500 (Internal Server Error)
• Creates project .gitignore - removes node_modules, etc
• Environment variables loaded from .env configuration file
• Server monitoring: nodemon

Installation

Install iron-generator as a global NPM package, so you can run it from anywhere in your computer:

$ npm install -g iron-generator

Quick Start

The quickest way to get started with express is to utilize the executable irongenerate(1) to generate an application as shown below:

Create the app:

$ irongenerate awesome-project/
$ cd awesome-project/

This will generate the following directory structure:

awesome-project/
├── app.js
├── package.json
├── models
├── routes
│   └── index.js
├── views
│    ├── error.hbs
│    ├── index.hbs
│    └── layout.hbs
├── public
│   ├── images
│   ├── javascripts
│   │   └── script.js
│   └── stylesheets
│       └── styles.sass
├── .env
├── .gitignoe
├── bin
    ├── www

Install all dependencies described in package.json:

$ npm install

Start your Express.js app at http://localhost:3000/:

$ npm start

Command Line Options

This generator can also be further configured with the following command line flags.

-h, --help           output usage information
    --version        output the version number
-c, --css <engine>   add stylesheet <engine> support (plain|less|sass|scss) (defaults to scss)
-f, --force          force on non-empty directory

License

MIT