So one of the application methods in express.js is app.all, which is a method that can be used to work with any kind of http request method. The most commonly used methods are of course ‘GET’, and ‘POST’. However there are many more that also make sense for what they are, and at times it might be desirable to have a way work with any kind of incoming request regardless of the certain method. This is where app.all can be of help. In this post I will be writing about the app.all method in express, I will be showing some use case examples, and will touch base on the different http methods.

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Every now and then I like to play around with one of the methods in lodash such as the _.countBy collection method that I will be writing about in this post. The lodash countby method can be used to create an object where each key is the result that is return by a method that is called for each element in a collection. Each value is the count for that key value that is returned when calling the method used with count by for each collection element.

In other words the _.countBy method returns a new object with keys, and values generated from a given method with a source collection object. The return value of the method given to the count by method can be any string value that will work well as a key name for an object property, and there will be a count for each key.

I do this just because lodash is still very popular, and it makes sense to play around with it now and then, and maybe compare what there is to work with to what is available in plain old core javaScript by itself.

When I do so sometimes it looks like native methods are just being wrapped by lodash, other times a lodash method does seem to bring something new to the table. In other cases there is no native javaScript counterpart, so then it is just a question if the method is something that I will ever use in a project, and how much time it saves me from writing my own solution. I am not sure if the lodash count by method is one such method that I would find myself using often, or at all, but this is the lodash method for today so lets look at a few examples.

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As of late I have been writing some content on express.js, and as such it was only a matter of time until I came to a point where it is time to look into how to handle session data, and user authentication. If I want to implement user authentication in a way that I perceive as the right way, I will want to use passport. However so far I often find myself making simple hobby apps, as such I can take a more informal route to handling authentication involving some system that is just assignment of a unique id to each client by way of a cookie file for example. In any case this post is about express-session, a great project for working with session data in an express.js project

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When making a full stack node.js powered application using express.js, there will often be a need to set up a way to handle user authentication (aka login in). This process can be a little involved, but there are ways to help make it go a lot faster by using common libraries, and tools to make this process far less painful compared to attempting to do it from scratch. There is a project called passport that can help make authentication a whole word easier.

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Cookies are still a great way of tracking visitors to a website including node.js projects made with express.js. In express the usual choice for parsing cookies is the cookie-parser module. In this post I will be covering a basic demo that makes use of cookie parser, as well as some other pitfalls that are common with cookies in express.

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