Expressful

Essential web technologies in one package.

Currently in development

$ npm install expressful --save

Quick start

Expressful sets up a Node.js web server for the rest of us.

// app.js
const app = require('expressful')({
  root: __dirname
});
app.serveContent();
app.start();

Expressful is a tiny wrapper around the most popular Node.js web framework Express.js, loved by many.

Read the total beginner guide on how to run an Expressful app

Is Expressful right for me?

You want to make branding websites. So you learn HTML, CSS, and maybe JavaScript.

Soon you get overwhelmed by technologies such as Node.js, Express.js, build tools such as gulp) and CSS processors such as CSS Next to name a few.

Although essential, these tools have steep learning curves.

Expressful brings you these essential web technologies in one package.

Expressful gets out of your way. You focus on content, design and publishing your website.

Websites that you should build with Expressful

• App landing pages
• Small business websites
• Portfolio's

Goals of Expressful

• Remove setup time
• Easy for beginners
• Focus on content and design
• Focus on HTML and CSS
• Favors convention over configuration
• Keep your package.json dependencies list lean

A simple project structure

Expressful is focused on content, HTML and CSS. Most of your projects will look somewhat like this:

.
|-- /node_modules/        # contains dependencies such as expressful
|-- /public/              # contains assets such as images and fonts
|-- /css/                 # contains css files
|-- /content              # contains json and cson content files
|   |-- /about.json     
|   └-- /index.cson
|-- /views/               # contains html files
|   |-- /about.html
|   └-- /index.html
|-- /app.js               # starting point of your node app
└-- /package.json         # information about your app and dependencies

Content directory

Expressful is based on a Content First design approach. Start by putting your text in cson or json files in your content directory.

Each file represents a page on your actual website.

Basic content routing example

Nunjucks templating

Expressful uses the nunjucks templating engine by default.

It's setup with Remarkable and highlight.js which makes it easy to write content in Markdown

Expressful sets up Express.js with useful defaults

The Expressful app is just an Express.js app with useful defaults. Calling expressful() sets up a express app for you with those useful defaults.

const expressful = require('expressful');
const app = expressful();

1. sets up static directory for /public
2. mutes favicon request by default
3. sets up nunjucks templating (with Remarkable and highlight.js)
4. sets up the following modules

• body-parser
• compression
• errorhandler
• morgan
• serve-favicon
• errorhandler

Note: multer, cookie-parser and express-session are not in here

API Reference

Expressful is a tiny wrapper around Express.js. It offers some extra functions that make it even easier to work with:

• app.start()
• app.serveContent()

Configuration

Expressful is focused on convention over configuration. However, there is some configuration available:

const expressful = require('expressful');
 
// Values are defaults
const app = expressful({
  root: path.dirname(require.main.filename), // The `root` of your project
  publicDirectory: 'public', // 'public' is the default static folder
  viewsDirectory: 'views', // don't change this for no reason, used for testing mainly
  faviconPath: 'public/favicon.ico', // path to favicon
  muteFavicon: true, // make it easy to get started without a favicon
  useNunjucks: true, // nunjucks is the default templating engine
  staticMaxAge: '30 days' // Caching time for static resources
});

Setting the root is advised

// This would work in most cases, it works on Heroku for example
const app = require('expressful')();
 
// This will work anywhere
const app = require('expressful')({
  root: __dirname
});

Author & License

Created by Jeroen Ransijn under the MIT license.