Learning More: Explore the App Used in This Walkthrough

Important

The AWS OpsWorks Stacks service reached end of life on May 26, 2024 and has been disabled for both new and existing customers. We strongly recommend customers migrate their workloads to other solutions as soon as possible. If you have questions about migration, reach out to the AWS Support Team on AWS re:Post or through AWS Premium Support.

This topic describes the app that AWS OpsWorks Stacks deploys to the instance for this walkthrough.

To see the app's source code, extract the contents of the opsworks-windows-demo-nodejs GitHub repository to an empty directory on your local workstation. You can also log in to the instance that you deployed the cookbook to and explore the contents of the /srv/mylinuxdemoapp directory.

The index.js file contains the most significant code for the app:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var path = require('path');
var os = require('os');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var fs = require('fs');

var add_comment = function(comment) {
  var comments = get_comments();
  comments.push({"date": new Date(), "text": comment});
  fs.writeFileSync('./comments.json', JSON.stringify(comments));
};

var get_comments = function() {
  var comments;
  if (fs.existsSync('./comments.json')) {
    comments = fs.readFileSync('./comments.json');
    comments = JSON.parse(comments);
  } else {
    comments = [];
  }
  return comments;
};

app.use(function log (req, res, next) {
  console.log([req.method, req.url].join(' '));
  next();
});
app.use(express.static('public'));
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false }))

app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  var comments = get_comments();
  res.render("index",
    { agent: req.headers['user-agent'],
      hostname: os.hostname(),
      nodeversion: process.version,
      time: new Date(),
      admin: (process.env.APP_ADMIN_EMAIL || "[e-mail]" ),
      comments: get_comments()
    });
});

app.post('/', function(req, res) {
  var comment = req.body.comment;
  if (comment) {
    add_comment(comment);
    console.log("Got comment: " + comment);
  }
  res.redirect("/#form-section");
});

var server = app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, function() {
  console.log('Listening on %s', process.env.PORT);
});

Here's what the file does:

• require loads modules that contain some dependent code that this web app needs to run as expected.

• The add_comment and get_comments functions write information to, and read information from, the comments.json file.

• For information about app.get, app.listen, app.post, app.set, and app.use, see the Express API Reference.

To learn how to create and package your app for deployment, see Application Source.