I think NPM is an issue here, when deploying to production, would root access be needed unless things are correctly setup for npm to not require root access? https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/fixing-npm-permissions This article talks about how to make npm less needy for permissions, and in my case, I want to deploy to cloud with a PaaS container, and I don't have root access. So it seems we need a solution for how to make nmp work without root, and that means administration of npm is needed, as talked about in this article, 2 choices, and I don't know which is best. thx, Jeff.

OK, that worked. But only if I have root access on my personal machine or sudo. If I edit the config.js instead, and set MONGO_URL and PORT there, then it fails to start, with the npm start script. How to start without npm and get rid of needed root authority? Not sure how to set the env vars, since it doesn't seem to work if I touch config.js.. can I set env vars in config.js and then use 'node index.js'? Please recommend a procedure to get away from npm, it seems to be what is requiring root access. thx, J-

It's a great start, but if you can show people best practices, for a basic application, it will be 10 times more usable, since anybody that wants to build an app, needs nav, user db, registration.

Front-end perspective: Look at MEANJS.org, it has a very nice Yoeman packager for include, exclude of features from the package. CLI would hopefully have some config capabilities, where you could set up everything to use local DB, or remote DB, for example. Then all the testing, all services would be clued into a global setting for this. So if you change from DEV to PRODUCTION, this would be easy to set up in the CLI.