A chat room with message searching!

Summary of things covered

Node is a JavaScript interpreter and we need it to run our JavaScript server. Download it here.

Download Elastic Search here.

• Download Elastic Search, unzip it, and put it somewhere easily accessible from the command line (e.g. desktop)

Java Development Kit (JDK) is used by ElasticSearch, our DB technology. Download here.

• NOTE: this is different from the JRE, which is included in the JDK.

• Before starting the server, we need to start the Elastic Search database: /path/to/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch
  • You'll see a smattering of logs
  • Leave this command prompt window/tab open
• Run curl http://localhost:9200 to ensure its running
  • You should get a JSON object containing info about the Elastic Search version
• On your command line, change directories: cd app/
• Install the necessary packages: npm install
  • This will look inside the package.json file for the project's dependencies
  • This will create a package-lock.json file -- ignore it
• To start the web app, run: node app.js