NodeJS and Express - separate my controllers and models

Question

I'm building my first Express app. It's a bit messy as my controllers and my models are all in the same place: the app.js file. Is there a way that I can separate those? Even artificially, by creating different files and then using some third party program to compile them into the app.js file.

Answer 1

First of all, you need to create your controllers and model folders.

You can use a module called express-load which can be used to autoload models, routes, schemas, configs, controllers, object maps... etc...

in your main file, mine is called app.js you load them right before start the server code line.. it should look like

//requires....
var load = require('express-load');

//your code 

load('models')
.then('controllers')
.then('routes')
.into(app);

http.createServer(app).listen(app.get('port'), function(){
    console.log("Express listening on port "+ app.get('port'));
});

module.exports = app;

Then, your view folder you can create folders to keep your code organized, then subfolders, I created a folder called home, and inside of it my index view.

In my controllers folder I created a js file called home.js, and which will look for my index view:

module.exports = function(app){

    var HomeController = {
        index: function(req, res){
            res.render('home/index');
        }
    };
    return HomeController;
}

At last in your routes folder, you can set your application routes, each view needs to be specified in your controller. My file for routes its called home.js

module.exports = function(app){
    var home = app.controllers.home;

    app.get('/', home.index);
}