Installing the express module for Node.js

The express module for Node.js makes it easy to build Representational State Transfer (REST) server applications using Node.js. REST is a powerful paradigm in web programming that uses the HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to manage the create, read, update, and delete (often abbreviated as CRUD) actions for document management in web services.

Using REST, the URLs are nouns representing what you want to manipulate, and the HTTP methods are verbs that perform the actions on those nouns.

In the recipes that follow, we'll use node's express module to build a RESTful server that returns documents from Mongo, as well as supports the basic CRUD operations. Before you begin, you need to install three more modules.

How to do it…

You'll use npm, the Node.js package manager, to install the cross-object resource module to support cross-domain scripting, express module, and the body-parser module used by express. To do this, run in your project directory...