About zavin-as

zavin-as is a convenient web application server which uses convention over configuration, helping developers in their tedious journey when working on their Node.js/Express web projects. zavin-as allows you to create individual separate deployable web apps within zavin-as.

• Website: https://frlorenzo.github.io/zavin-as/
• Tutorial: https://github.com/frlorenzo/zavin-as/blob/master/doc/tutorial.md
• Guide: https://github.com/frlorenzo/zavin-as/blob/master/doc/guide.md

Features

• Create and register independent web apps including assets
• Play around between development or production mode
• Live update when editing HTML, CSS files
• Use bundled modules in your web app

Setup

zavin-as can be deployed in Linux, Mac OS, Unix or Windows machine with 4GB memory, 100GB disk space. zavin-as prefer 64-bit Linux and Mac OS X for production deployments. zavin-as requires:

• Node.js v6.x or later
• MongoDB 3.x or later
• Git 2.7.x or later

Read the instructions how to setup each before installing. To follow the installation steps below make sure to include this tools in the PATH environment variable.

No Grunt/Gulp? As our preference to keeping things simple we do not want to struggle working around with Grunt or Gulp. Instead, we use npm as our build tool. I know npm cannot be compared with these two powerful tools but its just a matter preference.

Quickstart

$ git clone https://github.com/frlorenzo/zavin-as.git

Next, install dependencies

$ cd zavin-as
$ npm install

On a separate terminal window start your mongodb server:

$ mongod

Starting

You can start zavin-as for production use or use it for development.

To run for development use

$ npm run debug

Open you browser then point to http://localhost:3000

To start for production use

$ npm start

Open you browser then point to http://localhost:8080

Notice the difference in port numbers assigned. This can be changed in the system config file config.json. More on that below. Alternatively you can also run and start zavin-as via run and start commands located in the bin directory.

Creating an Application

1. From the zavin-as project copy the etc/template directory to app/hello-world

$ cp -r etc/template app/hello-world

1. Modify the app/hello-world/config.json file, setting the name property from "template" to the value "hello-world"

2. Register the hello-world app by adding it in the app/register.js. The regsiter.js file should look something like

...
require("./default");
require("./hello-world");

1. Assuming zavin-as is running in debug mode point your browser to http://localhost:3000/hello-world. Your Web browser should now display the welcome message

2. That's it. You can now hack into your app or add more features into it!