Building An E-Commerce App With Node.js & The ABOUT YOU API (1/3)

ABOUT YOU is a new fashion online shop with more than 55.000 products and offers an outstanding developer platform to create your own E-commerce app.
You write the code to build the showcase, ABOUT YOU manages the whole backend, payment & fulfillment process.

There are already a bunch of apps showcased on aboutyou.de

This is going to be a tutorial which consists of three parts:
Initial setup, using the ABOUT YOU SDK for Node.js and creating an UI with a shopping basket.

Part I: Initial setup

For the first part of this tutorial I show you the inital setup & required packages to build our Node.js web app.

Packages

Our application uses the Express framework which can be considered the de facto standard for Node.js development.

I assume that you’ve got the node & npm executables setup already.

Installing Express

To install Express globally use the following command

npm install -g express

After that we’re going to create a new folder and use Express to setup a default Node.js project.

mkdir testapp
cd testapp
express --hbs
npm install

app.js is basically the skeleton of your application and is mainly responsible for bootstrapping your application.
package.json contains all requirements and should look something like this:

{
  "name": "testapp",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node ./bin/www"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "~4.9.0",
    "body-parser": "~1.8.1",
    "cookie-parser": "~1.3.3",
    "morgan": “~1.3.0",
    "serve-favicon": "~2.1.3",
    "debug": "~2.0.0",
    "hbs": "~2.7.0"
  }
}

Next to Express we defined handlebars for rendering our server-side templates.

In your app.js we can get rid of the following lines.

var users = require(‘./routes/users’);
app.use('/users', users);

Also delete /routes/users.js as we are not going to need it for the project.

In this tutorial most of the implementation is going to happen in routes/index.js. This is the place where we define the functions to be executed when our application receives HTTP requests.

You can run the project by executing

npm start

in your project’s root folder and navigate to http://localhost:3000. Please note, npm start is an alias for node ./bin/www defined in the package.json file.

Visit your initial application via http://localhost:3000

Congratulations, we have finished all the required setup and we can now concentrate on the ABOUT YOU SDK integration in the next part of this tutorial.