Shopping-Cart with Node.js

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Requirements

For development, you will only need Node.js and Mongodb(database to store data), installed in your system environement.

Node

• Node installation on Windows

  Just go on official Node.js website and download the installer.

If the installation was successful, you should be able to run the following command.

$ node --version
v18.14.0

$ npm --version
9.3.1

Starting with modules

• To get working on the project

  Before that we should setup some dependencies:

  Try out these dependencies to install:-

• express-handlebars

  $ express --hbs

• npm all dependencies

  npm install

• To auto-start the server after editing in code, try out nodemon dependency

  npm i nodemon

• Defining express in app's render engine

  var express = require('express');
  var app = express();
  

  This will automatically listen at port 3000 when nodemon initialises.

Response methods

res.json()

res.render() - render() function is used to render a view and sends the rendered HTML string to the client.

res.redirect() - Redirects the user to the specified route by forcing another request to an extrernal site or within the app

View Engine setup

Here we use express-handlebars to view dynamic html pages.

app.set allows us to configure app settings - we are gonna configure the view engine setting, so the app knows which view engine to use ie handlebars.

app.set("view engine", "hbs")

Express-handlebars are used here since express alone is not having handlebar as its libraray we use them in app's render engine.

import {engine} from "express-handlebars"

app.engine("hbs", hbs.engine());

Since we use the layouts and partials so the view engine setup looks like this:

app.set('views', path.join(__dirname, 'views')) - default

app.engine('hbs',hbs.engine({layoutsDir: __dirname+"/views/layout"})); - For layouts

app.engine('hbs',hbs.engine({partialsDir: __dirname+"/views/partials/"})); - For partials

Now to render an hbs file we use res.render() and automatically the hbs express-handlebars will look views folder.