I did the tutorials, now lets just jump in to the deep end

The intial steps were:

$ mkdir nodeserver
$ cd nodeserver
$ npm init
$ npm install express --save

To run it, navigate to the nodeserver directory and then:

$ screen
$ node server.js

This sets it in a screen session. The terminal can be closed. To get back to that screen session just type this:

$ screen -r

You'll be recoonected to the backgrounded shell.

Trying out HandleBars (hbs) as a simple templating engine.

$ npm install hbs --save-dev

Nodemoon restarts the server automatically whenever you save a file that the server uses. Critical:

$ npm install nodemon --save-dev

but it doesn't get installed globally (cause we're not gonna use the -g flag, so we'll need to add the path to the bat in the package.json file.)

added this: "devserv" : "./node_modules/.bin/nodemon server.js" to so now npm run devserv launched the server in dev mode.

no other way of getting the post values out... kind of crazy. but... anyway:

$ npm install body-parser --save-dev

and it seems to work. data gets passed via req.body.name next up MongoDB