Sometimes the simplest, easiest things are not documented anywhere, or at least, not documented very clearly, so I just thought I would document what I did here in order to get started running the examples provided in the full Express codebase.
Let’s suppose that node and npm are already installed and I am in the home directory of a Linux user. I do:
$ git clone https://github.com/visionmedia/express.git express_examples
and Express is cloned to the express_examples subdirectory. I then change into that directory:
$ cd express_examples
and tell the npm package manager to check for all dependencies (if you are on the Express mailing list see discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/express-js/browse_thread/thread/166a75fdb33c4ea8):
$ git submodule update --init
$ npm install
The package manager npm will now do a lot of work and pages will scroll by. After a short while the trundling will stop and a ./node_modules directory will be filled with dependencies.
Then you can run any example you like:
$ node examples/blog/app.js
If you now point your browser at the server at port 3000 (i.e. http://example.com:3000) you should see the blog app and be able to try it out as messages are logged to your shell session.
Edit: I did realize after writing this that the following concise instructions are actually to be found in the Readme.md file:
“## Viewing Examples
First install the dev dependencies to install all the example / test suite deps:
$ npm install
then run whichever tests you want:
$ node examples/jade/app.js
“