Question

I’m new into Node.js and my intention is to build a web site similar (but way less complex) than Imgur, where uploading images is possible by dragging photos from desktop to the browser.

For this I want to use Node.js and MongoDB.

I have been looking around everywhere and found a lots of tutorials (many of them out dated) for setting up a database, but none for file uploading. Node.js and all it’s modules is like a jungle, and it really isn’t easy to know which modules to use in which type of context.

So, what I really could use here is some help with suggestions of tutorials and/or modules that may fit for this purpose. What is the easiest and best way to get started with this?

This is a school project that I need to do (I selected Node.js for server side myself, not knowing how complex it really is and now it’s to late to change), so I would really appreciate your help here.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can get away without using most of the node.js modules aside from the mongodb driver. Express is a popular framework for web applications, but it might even be overkill here. Really, you just need to serve some HTML with the drag and drop code, and then be able to receive and serve images. It’s probably less than 50 lines of code in actual node.js, plus whatever frontend code you have.

Check out this tutorial for the image upload portion on the node.js side using express:
https://github.com/visionmedia/express/blob/master/examples/multipart/app.js

Here’s a tutorial for the frontend drag and drop functionality:
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/html5-drag-and-drop-and-file-api-tutorial/

Update You might also consider http://mongoosejs.com/, which makes mongodb interaction a bit easier–but the native driver isn’t too bad to use by itself.