README.md

Nautilus

The purpose of Nautilus is to provide a basic structure around an Express application to allow better maintainability and rapid prototyping of new apps.

While Nautilus is opinionated and borrows heavily from the conventions of other Express frameworks, there are a few things that it aims to do differently:

• Wrap, don't re-invent. Wherever possible Nautilus will only wrap existing libraries and conventions rather than forcing an arbitrary new one that we think you should follow.
• Don't bury the core in abstraction. In any hook you have access to the core Express application. It's not the "Nautilus" version of Express, it's just Express pure and simple.
• A starting point, not a comprehensive solution. You will still need to know how to Express to make a full application. Hopefully this just makes it a little bit easier!

Stack overview

• Express for the web stuff
• Socket.io for real-time communication
• Mongoose for models and ORM in MongoDB
• JTS for fast, minimal server-side templates
• Lusca for security middleware
• Winston for logging

Getting started

Configuration

Standard configuration

User provided configuration can be accessed at the app.config object. Each top-level key corresponds with a file located in your /config directory. Generally, core hooks will look for configuration files which match their name.

Environment-specific configuration

Standard configuration will be overwritten with environment-specific values which are located in the config/env directory. The name of the file should match the value of process.env.NODE_ENV.

For example, a server run with NODE_ENV=production npm start will prefer configuration in the config/env/production.js file above all others.

This is useful when a large amount of configuration should change between development and production environments.

Local development configuration

Finally, a config/local.js file can be created and excluded from GIT which will override all other configuration including environment. This is useful for local development when a number of settings need to be overwritten temporarily.

Security

Security is provided by the Lusca module and can be configured through config/security.js.

Routes

Work in progress.

Models and ORM

Models are constructed through Mongoose which also provides an ORM out of the box. Model definitions can be placed in the /api directory and must have the suffix .model.js. Model schema can be configured with the schema object and any options provided with an options object:

Here's a sample "User" model located in api/user.model.js:

module.exports = {
  schema: {
    email: {
      type: String,
      trim: true,
      required: true,
      unique: true,
      match: [/^\w+([\.-]?\w+)*@\w+([\.-]?\w+)*(\.\w{2,3})+$/, 'Valid email address required']
    },
    name: String,
    password: {
      type: 'string',
      match: [/((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-zA-Z]).{6,20})/, 'Secure password required']
    },
  }
};

In this example, the model will be created at runtime and available as the superglobal User for querying in other controllers or services.

Templates

Server side templates by default use the JTS module. This is an extremely lightweight and minimal server-side template engine which uses Javascript template strings available in ES6.

This can be overridden in your application by customizing config/views.js.