Installing MERN Software & Understanding the Project Components

Where and what to deliver

Where and what to deliver: You deliver the project as a .zip (package) file in Blackboard on the Assignment page. Include the link to a 2 min. video of your application in a submission.txt file included in your project. NOTE: Only the third part of the project will be delivered for evaluation.For submission details see the Section “Submitting the Project for Grading” on page 15 of this document.

Description: The project consists of three component parts. The first two give you the skills and knowledge required to complete the third one which is the one that you will be delivering for evaluation.The project is taken from the Stanford course, CS142, with the permission of the course leader Mendel Rosenblum.

Installing MERN Software
The programming projects for this class require you to install Node.js and MongoDB. Follow the instructions below to install them.
Installing Node.js Install the latest "Long Term Support (LTS)" version of Node.js (currently version 14.16.1). It can be downloaded from the. To verify you have Node.js and its package manager (npm), try running the which should run and print out the version numbers of your node and npm programs.mongod (the exact arguments depend on where you placed the database) you should be able to directly interact with the MongoDB database by running the command:

Type help at the command prompt to see the available commands For Windows users, you may need to add the location of where MongoDB was installed to your environment path variable in order to run the commands. This is usually located at Install Node.js and the npm package manager on your system, following the installation instructions above.Create a directory projectFirstPart and extract the contents of the attached zip file firstPart_projectFiles.zip into the directory. The zip file contains the starter files for this assignment.This assignment requires many node modules that contain the tools (e.g. Webpack, Babel, ESLint) needed to build a ReactJS web application as well as a simple Node.js web server (ExpressJS) to serve it to your browser. These modules can be fetched by running the following command in the projectFirstPart directory.

That command will fetch around 650 node modules using around 150 megabytes of space into the subdirectory node_modules We can use npm to run the various tools we had it fetch. As can be seen in the "scripts" property of the package.json file, the following run commands are available:
• npm run lint - Runs ESLint on all the project's JavaScript files. Your code should run ESLint without warnings.
• npm run build - Runs Webpack using the configuration file webpack.config.js to package all of the projects JSX files into a single JavaScript bundle in the directory compiled.
• npm run build:w - Runs Webpack like the "run build" command except it invokes webpack with --watch so it will monitor the React components and regenerates the bundle if any of them change. This option is useful for development so changes made to components can be picked up by simply refreshing the browser to load the newly updated bundle.

This project uses ReactJS, a popular framework for building web applications. The project's goal is to get you enough up to speed with ReactJS and the course's coding conventions that you will be able to build a web application with it in the next part of the project.In order to fetch our web app via the HTTP protocol, we use a simple Node.js web server that can be started with the command from the projectFirstPart directory.