The Application

For 2015 I am really motivated to take massive actions to get closer to my goals in different aspects of my life, sadly enough the current applications that are in the market are more geared towards individual tracking of goals. I believe if you really want to achieve a goal you have to be SMART(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timeline) about how you achieve them. I am going to be tackling some challenging goals for 2015, and one of the ways I can stay committed to actually achieving the goals is if I put my reputation on the line, to be exact it would be online. This is probably one of the scariest and frankly, the hardest part about goals, letting others know what you are working on because the moment you do. You are putting your reputation on the line to go out and complete the goal. The current software solution that exists’s did not quite meet my expectations, so I decided to create my own application and use some of those MEAN tools, and see what all the “buzz” is about.

The requirements of the application are going to be straightforward and should be easy enough to get an actual MEAN application under our belts. Specifications as follows

• Goals page(s)
• Individual Goal tracking
• About page
• Blog in Markdown
• Contact Form

Now there is not one single tool that will do all this, and yes I could use WordPress or create a Rails application using the normal web application frameworks. But we are out to create the world’s best “goals setting” application.

Learning MEAN.IO

You are here to learn MEAN, and we will be implementing this application using the MEAN.IO starter boilerplate forked right off the git repo. For those that are completely new to the MEAN stack, we will be covering the from scratch moto for the application. One note before you decide to use the MEAN stack you might want to learn about some of the reason why you shouldn’t find out why MEAN.IO will fail. But if you are determined to continue let’s go ahead and get started.

Setup your development Environment

I am assuming that you are going to be following along on a Linux server if you don’t know what I am talking about check out setting up a LAMP stack. Once you have a LAMP box, let’s jump right into installing the prerequisites.

Install NodeJS

If you are in ubuntu 14.04, the apt-get install should work flawlessly with your environment.

If you encounter an error when installing node for example

Ubuntu comes with a package that automatically creates a link so the command ‘node’ can be invoked as ‘node’ only by creating a link.

Install MongoDB

Install NPM

Install MEAN.IO CLI tools

Setup Apache with nodejs

Example Apache configuration

Activate the site

Adjust your host file

Now on your local machine you, want to tell it about the newly created site on your local server. Let’s get it done, with the following command.

Initialize your MEAN application

Finally the last part let’s kick off this application!

That’s it for part 1! Congratulations give your self-pat on the back and get ready for part 2!

Until next time,

Rick H.

This tutorial is now outdated. If you want to stay up to date with the MEAN Stack you will want to check out this Complete Guide instead