Welcome to the mean-apz wiki!

Here is documented a step-by-step tutorial on how to create an application in the MEAN (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node.js) stack.

Why MEAN?

Take, for instance, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. In the view layer, you (usually) have to work with HTML/CSS/Javascript. In the business layer, PHP. In the persistence layer, SQL. Disregarding markup languages, you have to use at least three languages in a single app, which makes the coding rather schizophrenic. In the MEAN stack, however, both the front end and the back end are written in JavaScript. MongoDB, being NoSQL, stores data as JSON documents, allowing for easy communication with the rest of your application, while also being much less restrictive than MySQL's table structure. Node.js makes for a powerful back-end environment and means that not only all of your code will be in JavaScript, but you can also use the most recent versions available (ES5/6/7) and their powerful features.

Steps

1. Initiate your package.json and install dependencies
2. Set up your Express server, database connection and routes
3. Install Bower, initiate your bower.json and install front-end dependencies
4. Install Gulp, create your gulpfile.js and concatenate your *.js and *.css files
5. Understanding AngularJS 1.x
6. Creating your initial page with AngularJS 1.x
7. Set up your AngularJS 1.x app module and routing
8. Creating your own directive
9. Deploy to Heroku