Node.js Web Application Boilerplate.

Quick-start your backend and frontend with this boilerplate.

Features

• Start the Node.js express server in single process or multi process mode
• Compile and bundle frontend Javascript (ECMAScript 6)
• Compile and bundle frontend CSS from LESS
• Logging
• Configurations
• Error handling
• CORS
• Automatic server restart and compilations during development

Getting started

• Install Node.js v6
• Install yarn: npm install -g yarn
• Install dependencies: yarn
• Install gulp: npm install -g gulp

Running in development

• From shell: NODE_ENV=local gulp
• From WebStorm follow these settings

Running in production

• Compile your assets: gulp jsx:compile && gulp less:compile
• Start server: NODE_ENV=production node app.js

Directory structure

• assets private assets
  • jsx frontend javascript that will be compiled
  • less less files
• config configurations
  • config.js main configuration file
• middleware express middleware
• public public assets
  • css compiled css files
  • js compiled frontend javascript
• routes all routes
  • routes.js entry point for all routes
• util utility and helper functions
• views ejs files and templates
• app.js entry point of the application server
• gulpfile.js various gulp tasks

Technology stack (reasoning)

• Node.js v6 (fast and battle-tested process based async architecture, ECMAScript 6)
• Server side ECMAScript 6 (arrow functions, classes, template strings, spread, etc.)
• yarn as packaging manager (faster and safer than npm and removes the need for shrinkwrap)
• Express as web application framework (popular, fast, unopinionated, minimalist)
• Node.js native cluster (more processes for more throughput)
• Logging with winston and winston-express
• Configurations simply though Javascript
• Routing natively with Express.Router (simple, thus fast)
• EJS for templates
• LESS for CSS (less is more)
• Partial templates with EJS (simple and no magic from using other libraries)
• Frontend side Javascript (ECMAScript 6) compilation and injection with babel and browserify
• Watchers for automatic frontend Javascript builds in development
• Watchers for automatic LESS compilations in development
• Watchers for automatic server restarts in development with nodemon
• Caching (Nginx reverse proxy cache, S3, Memcached or files)
• ESLint (linting for better code readability)