i’m not much of a windows guy anymore, but was asked to make an install script for developers at work who wanted to write node.js code on windows. the problem with node.js development on windows is not so much about node.js itself, but the limitations of the basic design of the language and its solution. with node.js and its event loop-based architecture, it doesn’t excel at computationally intensive code, so its solution is to compile native libraries and use those to get the performance needed.

this solution is quite viable, but this also requires you to be able to compile these extensions. this is where there are a few problems. trying to get a C compiler on a windows box is sort of non-trivial, but what’s worse is that some of the libraries out there aren’t ported to windows and then you are dead in the water.

so if i absolutely had to develop in windows, i’d setup a VM. and if i had to use a VM, i’d use vagrant for headless virtualization management. and if i had to use vagrant, i’d use virtualbox for virtualization because of its built-in integration with vagrant.

but now the problem is there are a bunch of dependencies that need to be installed before you can even start developing on windows: vagrant, virtualbox, some linux OS, node.js in the linux OS and all of the build tools needed for npm installation for the linux VM. now let’s say that you have a team of windows developers and you want to get them setup quickly. how do you do that? well, that was what i was asked to solve and so i decided to make a windows installer that will install all of the dependencies.

it turns out that there is a pretty established solution available: nullsoft scriptable install system. it comes bundled with plenty of examples and though i feel that the scripting language available with NSIS is a little awkward, the documentation and resources available for it make it fairly easy to use.

the trickiest part of the NSIS script was figuring out how to launch an .msi file instead of a standard .exe file. it turns out that you have to invoke it via msiexec.exe.

so great, you can make a windows installer that will install all of your dependencies. spin up a vagrant box, install all of the dependencies in your VM, then package it up and make an installer that will install everything for you. easy! now you will have an automated install of your development environment.

passport and passport-facebook offers very easy facebook authentication integration into your node app. for the most part, it’s very straightforward, but i got tripped up in a few places.

i’m using krakenjs for my express framework so you have to be a little mindful that some of the express setup stuff has been abstracted away from you. because of that, i was puzzled because i didn’t understand why i couldn’t get access to the passport user object once authenticated.

sessions
passport wants to uses sessions. make sure that you enable the express session middleware and make sure you use the middleware before trying to use passport. order matters here. additionally, if you are using cluster, you can’t use in-memory sessions, you’ll have to use something that is globally accessible by all node processes…something like redis can be used via connect-redis.

passport extends express’ req with the isAuthenticated() method
i initially thought that i had to implement and check whether or not the user is authenticated, but passport handles this for you.

you have to implement passport.serializeUser() and passport.deserializeUser()
passport.serializeUser() is the function that will serialize the user info into the session, typically the user ID. at this point, you have access to the Facebook profile object, so you have information like: facebook user ID, username, displayName, etc.

This function is run once at time of authentication to put the authenticated user into the session.

passport.deserializeUser() is the function that will take the user ID from the session then construct the full information of the user and then make this object available in req.user. this function is run on every request to construct the req.user object so make sure that this code is performant. documentation everywhere says that this is where you would query a database to get user information, but it seems like involving a caching layer here would be advised.

i’ve been working with node a lot lately and i’m surprised that i haven’t needed to do this sooner, but i finally needed to set up SSL for one of my node apps and it wasn’t hard to do, but there was no one place where all of the steps were documented on how to setup SSL using express. it actually is pretty straightforward and easy.

first you need to create a certificate for SSL. this can be done by using the command line tool: openssl.

once you have the certificate, all you have to do is tell node that you want to use the certificate you made for the SSL requests. what i didn’t know, but is actually very clearly documented in express’ api documentation is that the variable “app” returned by express() is actually a function used as a callback for node’s http to handle requests. so instead of starting up your server via an app.listen() call, you can simply go back to the basics and use node’s http and https APIs to start the server and pass express’ app to it.

if you want the same code to handle both http and https requests, you can simply call http and https’ createServer() method on different ports.