Appendix: Express Setup on a Local Machine

Express setup

In order to build a Node and Express application, we just need to initialize a Node environment and install a few npm packages, as well as their corresponding declaration files as follows:

mkdir node-express-app
cd node-express-app
npm init
npm install express
npm install @types/express --save-dev

We have created a directory named node-express-app, changed into this directory, and then initialized a Node environment with the npm init command.

We then install the express module using npm and install the TypeScript declaration files for Express, as in @types/express. We will also need to initialize a TypeScript environment within the same directory, which can be done as follows:

tsc --init 

Compile and run

We can compile and run our newly minted Express web application as follows:

tsc
node minimal_app

Here, we are invoking the TypeScript compiler to compile our application and are then using the Node engine to execute the minimal_app.js file. We will then see the following log on the console:

listening on port 3000

Installing the config library

We can install the config library using npm as follows:

npm install config

We will also need the associated type information, which can be installed as follows:

npm install @types/config --save-dev

Installing Handlebars

Handlebars can be installed via npm as follows:

npm install hbs

Installing the Bootstrap library

We can install the Bootstrap library as follows:

npm install bootstrap

Installing body-parser package

We can install and configure a package named body-parser as follows:

npm install body-parser

Installing the express-session library

We can install and configure a package named express-session as follows:

npm install express-session
npm install @types/express-session