Setting up development environment

Starting my MERN stack journey and I am going to talk about how I am setting up the development environment. As I am a noob, my ultimate goal is building a basic CRUD app while learning step by step.

I downloaded MongoDB Compass from the official MongoDB website and installed it on my system. After launching it, I set up a connection to my local MongoDB server by entering localhost:27017 as the connection string. I then connected successfully to view and manage my databases.

As part of my learning journey, I started by downloading and installing Node.js along with npm from the official Node.js website- https://nodejs.org/en

After setting it up, I checked the versions using two commands in my terminal-

node -v

npm -v

As I have Node and npm ready, I began exploring the packages I’d need. For now, I’ve decided to install express, mongoose, body-parser, and dotenv. These are the foundations for the project. Once installed, they’ll show up in our “dependencies” section of the package.json file. This file keeps track of everything we are using in our project.

I also learned that the node_modules folder stores all installed packages.

My next step is to importing these into my index.js file and gradually figuring out how to use them.

I hope this documentation is clear and helpful to anyone who stumbles upon it. Whether someone reads this or not, I’m excited to keep sharing my progress and challenges as I grow step by step.