Listing all unicode characters with Node

and how it would look like

Using Colourlovers.com API with NodeJS

Colourlovers.com has a pretty good and straightforward API.

The following snippet fetches the top palettes with the help of NodeJS

req.body undefined in POST request in Express js

You have to use a bodyparser to process the body of a POST request

app.use(express.bodyParser());

and put this before the routing definition, like this

app.configure('development', function() {

 console.log("Development mode");

 app.configure(function() {
    app.use(express.bodyParser());
    app.use(app.router);
    .....
 });
});

here is the related google groups thread.

Joyent Smartmachine Nodejs log


tail -f /var/svc/log/site-node-service\:default.log


Reset Joyent Smartmachine Nodejs git repo


cd ~
rm -rf repo
mkdir repo
cd repo
git --bare init
cp /opt/nodejs/post-receive* hooks/
cd ~


Deleting the old repo, creating a new one and then copy the post-recieve hooks.

Supervisor for NodeJS

Supervisor runs your nodejs programs and restarts them when a *.js file changes


npm install supervisor

supervisor -p server.js -w .
This example runs server.js and watches the current folder, if a js file changes in this folder it restarts the server.js

Installing NodeJS from source on Snow Leopard


git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node

mkdir ~/local
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/node
make
make install
export PATH=$HOME/local/node/bin:$PATH


Now if you open a new terminal window

node --version

you should see the new version number.

Creating a NPM package

NPM is a package manager for node.

Creating packages with NPM is not difficult so here are the steps.

1. Creating the package.json

Here is an example
{
"name": "packagename",
"version": "0.0.1",
"description": "Package description",
"main": "package.js",
"keywords": [
"foursquare",
"4sq"
],
"repository" : {
"type" : "git",
"url" : "https://yikulju@github.com/yikulju/Foursquare-on-node.git"
}
}

2. Linking it with NPM

npm link

3. Publishing the package

First, you have to create a user in the repo.
npm adduser

Then you can publishing the package
npm publish


This is a good resource (Introduction to npm) but for some strange reason it was difficult to read, maybe the writing style.

EJS default escaping

In EJS (Embedded JavaScript) escaping is a default behaviour.

// escape by default
<%= VARIABLE_NAME %>

This can easily mess up a couple of things (including JSON, HTML rendering), luckily you can turn it off by using

// render out string
<%- VARIABLE_NAME %>