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MEAN

MEAN is a free and open-source JavaScript software stack for building dynamic web sites and web applications.

Lando offers a configurable recipe for developing MEAN apps.

Getting Started

Before you get started with this recipe, we assume that you have:

  1. Installed Lando and gotten familiar with its basics.
  2. Initialized a Landofile for your codebase for use with this recipe.
  3. Read about the various services, tooling, events and routing Lando offers.

However, because you are a developer and developers never ever RTFM, an example of using the MEAN recipe to run a Ghost project is shown below:

Note that this could also be used for ExpressJS, Koa, KeystoneJS or any other MEANish project.

# Initialize a mean recipe for use with ghost
lando init --source cwd \
  --recipe mean \
  --option port=2368 \
  --option command="su - node -c '/var/www/.npm-global/bin/ghost run -d /app/src -D'" \
  --name meanest-app-youve-ever-seen

# Install ghost
lando ssh -c "npm install [email protected] -g && mkdir src && cd src && ghost install local --no-start --ip 0.0.0.0"

# Start it up
lando start

# List information about this app.
lando info

Configuration

While Lando recipes set sane defaults so they work out of the box, they are also configurable.

Here are the configuration options, set to the default values, for this recipe's Landofile. If you are unsure about where this goes or what this means, we highly recommend scanning the recipes documentation to get a good handle on how the magicks work.

recipe: mean
config:
  node: 10
  build:
    - npm install
  command: npm start
  database: mongo:4.0
  globals: []
  port: '80'
  ssl: false
  config:
    database: SEE BELOW

Note that if the above config options are not enough, all Lando recipes can be further extended and overriden.

Choosing a node version

You can set node to any version that is available in our node service. However, you should consult the requirements for whatever you are running to make sure that version is actually supported.

The recipe config to set the MEAN recipe to use node version 8 is shown below:

recipe: mean
config:
  node: 8

Installing application dependencies

Because most MEAN projects will require you npm install before they can start successfully, Lando will automatically run npm install before it runs what you specify as your commmand. You can, however, alter this to whatever you need.

recipe: mean
config:
  build:
    - yarn install
  command: yarn dev

Note that a good rule of thumb is that build should install whatever node dependencies you need to start your app. If you require other non-node dependencies like server packages, consider using a build step.

Setting a command

By default, your MEAN recipe will attempt to start the node service by running npm start. You can easily change this any other command.

Running a node script directly

recipe: mean
config:
  command: node /app/server.js

Running the yarn dev script

recipe: mean
config:
  command: yarn dev

Note that whatever command you specify, you will want to make sure build is also set to something that makes sense.

Choosing a database backend

By default, this recipe will use the default version of our mongo service as the database backend but you can also switch this to use mysql, mariadb or 'postgres' instead.

Note that you can also specify a version as long as it is a version available for use with lando for either mongo, mysql, mariadb or postgres.

Using mongo (default)

recipe: mean
config:
  database: mongo

Using MySQL

recipe: mean
config:
  database: mysql

Using MariaDB

recipe: mean
config:
  database: mariadb

Using Postgres

recipe: mean
config:
  database: postgres

Using a custom version

recipe: mean
config:
  database: postgres:9.6

Installing global dependencies

You can also use the globals key if you need to install any global node dependenices. This follows the same syntax as your normal package.json except written as YAML instead of JSON.

An example of globally installing the latest gulp-cli is shown below:

recipe: mean
config:
  globals:
    gulp-cli: latest

See install global node dependencies for more info.

Using SSL

Also note that ssl: true will only generate certs in the default locations and expose port 443. It is up to the user to use the certs and secure port correctly in their application like the node snippet below:

// Get our key and cert
const key = fs.readFileSync('/certs/cert.key')
const cert = fs.readFileSync('/certs/cert.crt'),

// Create our servers
https.createServer({key, cert}, app).listen(443);
http.createServer(app).listen(80);

// Basic HTTP response
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.header('Content-type', 'text/html');
  return res.end('<h1>I said "Oh my!" What a marvelous tune!!!</h1>');
});

Setting a port

While we assume your MEAN app is running on port 80, we recognize that many node apps also run on port 3000 or otherwise. You can easily change our default to match whatever your app needs.

recipe: mean
config:
  port: '3000'

Using custom config files

You may need to override our default MEAN config with your own.

If you do this, you must use files that exist inside your application and express them relative to your project root as shown below:

A hypothetical project

Note that you can put your configuration files anywhere inside your application directory. We use a config directory but you can call it whatever you want such as .lando in the example below:

./
|-- config
   |-- my-custom.cnf
|-- index.php
|-- .lando.yml

Landofile using custom mean config

recipe: mean
config:
  config:
    database: config/my-custom.cnf

Connecting to your database

Lando will automatically set up a database with a user and password and also set an environment variable called LANDO INFO that contains useful information about how your application can access other Lando services.

The default database connection information for a MEAN site is shown below:

Note that the host is not localhost but database.

host: database

# mongo
user: root
password: none
port: 27017

# mysql/mariadb
# database: mean
# username: mean
# password: mean
# port: 3306

# postgres
# database: mean
# username: postgres
# password: none
# port: 5432

You can get also get the above information, and more, by using the lando info command.

Importing Your Database

NOTE THIS ONLY APPLIES FOR SQL DATABASES AND NOT MONGO

Once you've started up your MEAN site, you will need to pull in your database and files before you can really start to dev all the dev. Pulling your files is as easy as downloading an archive and extracting it to the correct location. Importing a database can be done using our helpful lando db-import command.

# Grab your database dump
curl -fsSL -o database.sql.gz "https://url.to.my.db/database.sql.gz"

# Import the database
# NOTE: db-import can handle uncompressed, gzipped or zipped files
# Due to restrictions in how Docker handles file sharing your database
# dump MUST exist somewhere inside of your app directory.
lando db-import database.sql.gz

You can learn more about the db-import command over here.

Tooling

By default, each Lando MEAN recipe will also ship with helpful dev utilities.

This means you can use things like yarn, npm, mongo and node via Lando and avoid mucking up your actual computer trying to manage php versions and tooling.

lando mongo     Drop into the mongo shell
lando node      Runs node commands
lando npm       Runs npm commands
lando yarn      Runs yarn commands

Usage examples

# Install some things globally
lando npm install -g [email protected]

# Run yarn install
lando yarn install

# Drop into a mongo shell
lando mongo

# Check the node version
lando node --version

You can also run lando from inside your app directory for a complete list of commands. This is always advisable as your list of commands may not be 100% the same as above. For example, if you set database: postgres you will get lando psql instead of lando mongo.

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