Well after some thought, I figured it was time to roll up my sleeves and install some tools and frameworks to start with my minimilist IoT playground. I use macOS and will focus just on that.

Environment under macOS

I first started to go down the path provided at mean.io and felt there was too much of a heavy lift for a newbie trying to ramp up on four technologies at the same time. I opted for installing each of them by hand so I can see the type of problems can occur.

I installed the following:

Sublime Text – Nice editor and I started using it for Arduino development as well

MongoDB –  I used the homebrew approach.

$ brew install mongodb --with-openssl
$ sudo mkdir /data/dbmd 
$ whoami    
youraccount
$ sudo chown youraccount /data/db
# Default no authentication required so user beware.
# launch mongodb
$ mongodb

Node Version Manager (NVM) – Used to manage different versions of node.js. Note I have Xcode installed and you may need the command line tools later.

$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.2/install.sh | bash
$ nvm install node
$ nvm ls # list of node versions installed
$ nvm 
$ nvm alias default 7.8.0 # I want to keep version 7.8.0 as default

If the NVM is too much of a hassle, get node directory from node.js via download
Node.js – It is already newer than the version I have (7.8.0). This is an easy install and should not pose any problems

Express Generator – another straight forward install for light weight web framework

$ npm install -g express-generator  
# change to a directory where you want to install the express templates. e.g. min is chrapchp/Dev/nodes
$ express HomeSensors # what I called my app
$ cd HomeSensors
$ npm install

I installed the following as well based on what I thought I needed for this learning exercise.

Off to learning this stuff.