Step by Step Express: Evolution of an App Beyond "Hello, World"

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on a project to show students at Princeton how to build and deploy a Node.js application.

My intent was to focus on the build part of it – for students and solo developers, deployment should be as invisible and painless as possible. As such, I build a tiny web app – step by step – that starts from the "hello, world" you've already seen a thousand times and builds it into something more functional.

Basically, it's the guide to building a real app (not just "hello, world") I wish I'd had when I started learning Node.js.

bnb / step-by-step-express

Step-by-step evolution of a lightweight Express web app that will serve XKCD comics

Step by Step Express

The intent of this project is to take you step-by-step through the process of building an Express app, documenting the changes as bite-sized chunks that you'll ideally be able to pick up and iterate upon rapidly.

Step Zero

Initalize the repo with the universal documents that we should have in every project

Step One

Set up a very basic HTTP server + add the dependencies

To run the Step One code:

# make sure your current working directory is the main directory of this repo
cd step-one
node app.js

Step Two

Set up a very basic HTTP server + add the dependencies

To run the Step Two code:

# make sure your current working directory is the main directory of this repo
cd step-two
node app.js