Appendix A. Installing the stack
This appendix covers
- Installing Node and npm
- Installing Express globally
- Installing MongoDB
- Installing Angular
Before you can build anything on the MEAN stack, you’ll need to install the software to run it. This task is easy on Windows, macOS, and popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.
As Node underpins the stack, that’s the best place to start. Node ships with npm included, which will be useful for installing some of the other software.
The best way to install Node and npm depends on your operating system. Whenever possible, we recommend that you download an installer from the Node website at https://nodejs.org/download. This location always has the latest version as maintained by the Node core team.
We recommend using a long-term support (LTS) version of Node. These are the ones with even major numbers, such as Node 8 and Node 10. These versions are the stable branches of Node and will be maintained and patched with nonbreaking changes for 18 months. The application in this book is built against Node 11, so the best LTS version to use is 10. No features used in this book are incompatible between versions, so feel free to use either.
Windows users should download an installer from the Node website.