How to setup Cezerin eCommerce solution?

As a part of my education, I have to create an eCommerce solution to create an online webshop. I did some research what can I use in combination with Node.js and maybe even a front-end framework. Suddenly, I came across to Cezerin, a Node.js based eCommerce framework with React as a frontend framework.

Requirements

First of all, you need a Node.js Server with the latest version (8.9). The app is completely built on the React framework. Also, make sure you have installed the package manager (npm) so that you can download and install the files more easily. If you have this stuff, you are ready to go to make the first steps.

First steps

To install the solution, first clone the repository on your desktop.

git clone https://github.com/cezerin/cezerin.git

Go inside the folder and install the components with the following command:

# To install the missing components
npm install

# To create the distribution files
npm run build

After that you can hit

npm run

Database installation

You also need a MongoDB to store there the relevant data for your shop. You actually can install the MongoDB directly to your desktop as well, or you can create a free database on mLab. This gives you up to 500 MB of free storage and if you need more space, you can simply upgrade or switch to AWS or Google Cloud Storage directly.

In this tutorial, we will setup the DB with mLab. We create there an account and after that a database. Then create a new user, which has write and read access.

Now paste the server host, database name as well as username and password in the config/server.js file.

In the file, change the following parameters with the values from mLab.

Last steps

Before you can start your server, you should create the initializing data in the database by hitting the following command:

npm run setup

This creates all the necessary documents automatically in the database. Now you are able to start the server with:

npm start

You can access the server by accessing it via your browser on localhost:3000.

Conclusion

Right now, the framework is still in development and in the beta stages. There are still some bugs, but in my opinion, it is a very interesting project since JavaScript is a strongly growing programming language.