After installing Node yesterday I wanted to get my first real web application running today. I decided to use ExpressJS as my web framework, for no special reason. So, how do I get to my first simple web app?
Assuming I have nvm and node installed I can easily install npm (the node package manager) from here. To get express onto your machine, run this commands:
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh #install npm npm install -g express
It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that for express you need node v0.6.x. I installed v0.7.1, so I had to install v0.6.9 before trying to install express. You can check your installed version with this command:
nvm ls
If there is no v0.6.x, install it and then activate it:
nvm install v0.6.9 nvm use v0.6.9
Now you can create your first webapp with express:
express my-first-webapp && cd my-first-webapp npm install
express created a webapp skeleton for you and npm installed all the dependencies. Now you can go ahead and run the webapp:
node app.js
Open http://localhost:3000 and you'll see a little message that is generated with node and express.
