Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with Nodejitsu or any of the frameworks that I listed below in the post. I’m just documenting my experience with them – problems (and solutions) I’ve faced while trying these new technologies on a Windows machine.

MEN – MongoDB, Express, Node.js, and if you think MEN is not mean enough, take a look at the post on Deploying MEAN.io to Nodejitsu from Windows machine.

Nodejitsu is a cloud platform as a service based on Node.js and serves Node.js applications on their platform. Signup is free, you don’t have to enter billing info in order to try 2 months free (yes, databases work too!), just click on the “Do not select a product now” button:

After signing up you get a confirmation mail like this:

Welcome to Nodejitsu!
Your Nodejitsu account is activated and ready to go!
username: userName
To confirm your account, install the latest jitsu:
sudo npm install jitsu -g
and then run:
jitsu users confirm userName big-h@5h
This will allow you to deploy applications with:
jitsu deploy

Setting up databases in the web admin interface is easy as you only have to literally click one button after deciding which database type and provider you want:

Hackaton starters are gaining momentum  and there are quite a few of them already like:

• Hackaton starter
• Drywall
• DozerJS
• Skeleton
• MEAN – only one which offers Angular out of the box (a follow up post on this is here)

I decided to try out Skeleton, mainly because I liked the “just right” Goldilocks reference 🙂

So, as the site suggests, you first have to installnodemon , gulp  andmocha , then clone the github repo, npm & bower install everything and you’re done:

# Install global dependencies
npm install -g nodemon gulp mocha

# Clone the repoo (and fetch only the latest commits)
git clone --depth=1 [email protected]:dstroot/skeleton.git
cd skeleton

# Install local dependencies
npm install
bower install

# Start everything up with Gulp 
# (builds the assets and starts the app with nodemon)
gulp

Everything works for you? Great! For the rest of unlucky ones, you may got (like me) after running gulp :

gulp

module.js:340
    throw err;
          ^
Error: Cannot find module 'jshint-stylish'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:338:15)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:280:25)
    at Module.require (module.js:364:17)
    at require (module.js:380:17)
    at Object.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\gulpfile.js:22:21)
    at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
    at Module.require (module.js:364:17)

I tried npm install jshint-stylish , and ran gulp again:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton>gulp
[gulp] Using gulpfile C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\gulpfile.js
[gulp] Starting 'clean'...
[gulp] Finished 'clean' after 11 ms
[gulp] Starting 'styles'...
[gulp] Starting 'scripts'...
[gulp] Starting 'images'...
[gulp] Finished 'images' after 2.75 ms
[gulp] Starting 'lint'...
[gulp] Finished 'lint' after 192 ms
[gulp] Starting 'watch'...
[gulp] Finished 'watch' after 151 ms
[gulp] Starting 'develop'...
[gulp] Finished 'develop' after 1.68 ms
[gulp] Live reload server listening on: 35729
[gulp] gulp-notify: [Gulp notification] Clean task complete

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: Incorrect OS. node-notify requires Mac OS 10.8 or higher
    at C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify\node_modules\no
de-notifier\lib\terminal-notifier.js:46:25
    at Object.module.exports.isMacOSX (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_mod
ules\gulp-notify\node_modules\node-notifier\lib\utils.js:24:12)
    at Notifier.notify (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notif
y\node_modules\node-notifier\lib\terminal-notifier.js:44:11)
    at module.exports (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify
\lib\report.js:17:5)
    at Transform._flush (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-noti
fy\lib\notify.js:41:5)
    at Transform.<anonymous> (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp
-notify\node_modules\through2\node_modules\readable-stream\lib\_stream_transform
.js:130:12)
    at Transform.g (events.js:180:16)
    at Transform.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:92:17)
    at finishMaybe (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify\no
de_modules\through2\node_modules\readable-stream\lib\_stream_writable.js:363:12)

    at endWritable (C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton\node_modules\gulp-notify\no
de_modules\through2\node_modules\readable-stream\lib\_stream_writable.js:370:3)

As the message says (note also on their website),  gulp notify , which uses node-notify  is not supported on Windows. The way I solved this was that I removed all of the .pipe(notify({ onLast: true, message: ‘Scripts task complete’ }))  lines from gulpfile.js, but it still wasn’t enough! Running lint job made the gulp fail, so I removed that to and woila then it all worked.

A note (though you can look this up on the official github page also) on how to setup Google login by:

• Visit Google Cloud Console
• Click CREATE PROJECT button
• Enter Project Name, then click CREATE
• Then select APIs & auth from the sidebar and click on Credentials tab
• Click CREATE NEW CLIENT ID button
  • Application Type: Web Application
  • Authorized Javascript origins: http://localhost:3000
  • Authorized redirect URI: http://localhost:3000/auth/google/callback
• Copy and paste Client ID and Client secret keys into config/config.js

Note: When you ready to deploy to production don’t forget to add your new url to Authorized Javascript origins and Authorized redirect URI, e.g. http://my-awesome-app.nodejitsu.com and http://my-awesome-app.nodejitsu.com/auth/google/callback respectively. The same goes for other providers.

Deploying to Nodejitsu is done by firstly  loging in and then executing jitsu deploy:

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton>jitsu login
info:    Welcome to Nodejitsu hitman666
info:    jitsu v0.13.15, node v0.10.26
info:    It worked if it ends with Nodejitsu ok
info:    Executing command login
prompt: username:  (hitman666)
prompt: password:
info:    Authenticated as hitman666
info:    Nodejitsu ok

C:\Users\Nikola\Desktop\skeleton>jitsu deploy

Boom, your app is live on Nodejitsu server and it should look like this (ofc YMMV in term of link):

If you’re using Console 2, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to btw, you probably wanted to customize it. Here is an excellent post by Scott Hanselman on how to do it:http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandPrompt.aspx.

To change settings you have to right-click in the main console and click Edit | Settings.

The settings that I have used from his blog are:

• I’ve set Desktop as my startup directory under Console – Startup Directory
• I hid the menu, status bar and toolbar under Appearance | More
• I’ve set the font to Consolas, but font only 12, as 15 (as he suggests) looks way too big on my screen. No experimentation with matrix colors or transparency.
• I’ve set the option so that when I select with the mouse the selection gets coppied into the clipboard by selecting “Copy on Select” under Behavior
• Hotkeys, changed the New Tab 1 hotkey to Ctrl-T
• Hotkeys, changed Paste to Ctrl-V
• Do not use Ctrl-C as Copy Selection or you will not be able to break some command that keeps running after you run it (like grunt for example). And besides if you used my settings then you already have a “Copy on Select” option set. More info here: http://sourceforge.net/p/console/bugs/401/

edit (18.3.2014): So, it turned out I wanted to be matrix cool :), so I went to change the color of the font, but to no avail. Finally I figured out that actually the grey color needed to be changed to green and not white as I was doing. Here’s an image to make thing clearer: