Node / Express / Backbone Web Application Boilerplate

Description

Node/Backbone forms a powerful combination for building single page web applications that scale. Because of these two project's popularity, there are several great boilerplate projects out there, but all for either Node or Backbone seperately. This project aims to integrate these two worlds (Backend and Frontend) making it easy to start building next generation web applications.

The most prominent technologies are:

Backend:

• Node.js
• Express.js
• Mongoose.js / MongoDB

Frontend:

• Backbone.js
• Marionette.js
• Require.js

Getting started

1. Ensure you have installed the basic pre-requisits on your machine. (git, node, npm, mongoDB)

    // on *unix systems
    sudo apt-get install git nodejs npm mongodb-server
   
    // mongoDB install instructions
    http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/
   

2. Get the project source code from GitHub

    git clone git@github.com/cthorne66/BackNode-Express.git webapp
    cd webapp
   

3. Install node package dependencies

    npm install
   

4. Run the DB script to populate the DB

    cd /pathtomongo/bin
    mongo localhost:27017 /pathtoapp/app/config/db-scripts.js
   

5. Start the server

   node server.js
   

6. Point your browser to localhost:3000

7. login with user/password: admin / admin

Optional step. If you want, install nodemon (https://github.com/remy/nodemon) to listen for changes to files & redeploy automatically. Then start the app:

    nodemon server.js