MEAN is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you quick and organized way to start developing of MEAN based web apps with useful modules like mongoose and passport pre-bundled and configured. We mainly try to take care of the connection points between existing popular frameworks and solve common integration problems.

• Node.js - Download and Install Node.js. You can also follow this gist for a quick and easy way to install Node.js and npm
• MongoDB - Download and Install MongoDB - Make sure it's running on the default port (27017).

• NPM - Node.js package manager, should be installed when you install node.js.
• Bower - Web package manager, installing Bower is simple when you have npm:

$ npm install -g bower

• Grunt - Download and Install Grunt.

• Express - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
• Mongoose - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
• Passport - Defined as npm module in the package.json file.
• AngularJS - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.
• Twitter Bootstrap - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.
• UI Bootstrap - Defined as bower module in the bower.json file.

The quickest way to get started with MEAN is to clone the project and utilize it like this:

Install dependencies:

$ npm install

We recommend using Grunt to start the server:

$ grunt

When not using grunt you can use:

$ node server

Then open a browser and go to:

http://localhost:3000

During install some of you may encounter some issues, most of this issues can be solved by one of the following tips. If you went through all this and still can't solve the issue, feel free to contact us via the repository issue tracker or the links provided below.

Sometimes you may find there is a weird error during install like npm's Error: ENOENT, usually updating those tools to the latest version solves the issue.

Updating NPM:

$ npm update -g npm

Updating Grunt:

$ npm update -g grunt-cli

Updating Bower:

$ npm update -g bower

NPM and Bower has a caching system for holding packages that you already installed. We found that often cleaning the cache solves some troubles this system creates.

NPM Clean Cache:

$ npm cache clean

Bower Clean Cache:

$ bower cache clean

All configuration is specified in the server/config folder, particularly the config.js file and the env files. Here you will need to specify your application name, database name, as well as hook up any social app keys if you want integration with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub or Google.

There are three environments provided by default, development, test, and production. Each of these environments has the following configuration options:

• db - This is the name of the MongoDB database to use, and is set by default to mean-dev for the development environment.
• app.name - This is the name of your app or website, and can be different for each environment. You can tell which environment you are running by looking at the TITLE attribute that your app generates.
• Social OAuth Keys - Facebook, GitHub, Google, Twitter. You can specify your own social application keys here for each platform:
  • clientID
  • clientSecret
  • callbackURL

To run with a different environment, just specify NODE_ENV as you call grunt:

$ NODE_ENV=test grunt

If you are using node instead of grunt, it is very similar:

$ NODE_ENV=test node server

NOTE: Running Node.js applications in the production environment enables caching, which is disabled by default in all other environments.

We pre-included an article example, check it out:

• The Model - Where we define our object schema.
• The Controller - Where we take care of our backend logic.
• NodeJS Routes - Where we define our REST service routes.
• AngularJs Routes - Where we define our CRUD routes.
• The AngularJs Service - Where we connect to our REST service.
• The AngularJs Controller - Where we take care of our frontend logic.
• The AngularJs Views Folder - Where we keep our CRUD views.

Before you start make sure you have heroku toolbelt installed and an accessible mongo db instance - you can try mongohq which has an easy setup.

git init
git add .
git commit -m "initial version"
heroku apps:create
git push heroku master

• Visit us at Linnovate.net.
• Visit our Ninja's Zone for extended support.

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.