MEAN Stack CRUD example (updated 2018)

This tutorial is intended for Linux, Windows or MacOS.

All software used is free & open source.

The end result will be a basic starting point for a MongoDB, Express, Angular and NodeJS application with a simple CRUD implementation ready out of the box.

Requirements to succeed:

• basic knowledge of the Linux shell
• basic understanding of JavaScript
• linux, mac or windows operating system
• MongoDB installed on your operating system
• 10 to 15 minutes of your time depending on your Internet connection

First step: Install the NodeJS toolset

Linux (eg. Ubuntu)

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nodejs

sudo apt-get install npm

Windows & MacOS

Go to www.nodejs.org

Download & Install

Second step: Install the mongodb database connection component for NodeJS

It is important that you should have MongoDB preinstalled, as it is it's own program, and NodeJS has another NPM package called 'mongodb' as well which will be interface between the actual running Linux MongoDB program and the NodeJS JavaScript based server application.

For Linux:

sudo apt-get install mongodb

sudo service mongodb start

sudo systemctl enable mongodb

Note that the last command enables mongodb to restart itself when you reboot your server, see the section about Troubleshooting MongoDB for more advice if you run into trouble.

For MacOS:

Simply run: brew install mongodb and if you get errors, try: sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/var/homebrew and/or sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/Homebrew/ After all is complete, run sudo brew services start mongodb and your mongodb MacOS installation is complete :)

For Windows:

After installing mongodb, make sure that this works:

C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\4.0\bin\mongo.exe

..

Third step: Install the required NodeJS components & backend

For Linux & MacOS:

Open your terminal and enter or copy paste the following command:

cd ~

For Windows :

Find a suitable folder where to go with git bash / cmd.

For all 3 OSes:

git clone https://github.com/gfx0/meanstackcrud.git

cd meanstackcrud

npm start

You might be asked for sudo passwords, that's because we're using the port 80 to be able to only write localhost into the browser without that pesky extra number typing from the port numbers in localhost:3000 :P

Then just navigate with your browser to your http://localhost and you can experience the MEAN stack CRUD by clicking on the various buttons available on the bootstrap UI.

Congratulations! You have a MEAN Stack now! :)

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Troubleshooting MongoDB

Make sure you have enough hard disk on your server before proceeding, mongo failed to start silently as my tiny virtualbox instance ran out of diskspace, beware of this.

Make sure you don't have apache2 or nginx running under some other user, by checking with sudo ps aux |grep apache2 to see if there are any processes running. A nice way of shutting apache down for example is sudo service apache2 stop but this is the part where GoogleFu is important to master.

You can do a quick test of your MongoDB installation by running: npm install --save mongodb incase you haven't cloned this git repository yet. After that operation is complete, put the code snippet below this paragraph into index.js and run sudo node index.js If the result is 'database connection OK' then your MongoDB installation was succesfull and you're ready to party.

var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
MongoClient.connect('mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/test', function >(err, db) {
  if (err) { throw err; }
  console.log("Database connection OK.");
  db.close(); // Not that this db.close() is only for testing purposes, don't leave it into your code.
});

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Note: This tutorial was tested on Ubuntu 16.04 Linux, but can work on other Linux versions as well. You can install Oracle VirtualBox on Windows or MacOS and add Ubuntu on it for free to follow this tutorial if you wish.