M: “… hahaha, exactly. And speaking of RT*M, you know what I did yesterday?”
H: “No, but I like it already. Tell me more.”
M: “So I wanted to whip out a fast little Koa site. It’s sooo good for those.”
H: “Yeah, I know. You told me like a million times.”
M: “Ok… sorry. Off to the terminal I went and went through the usual steps:”
mkdir newAwesomeApp
cd newAwesomeApp
git init
npm init
npm install koa koa-route --save
touch app.js
H: “Dude, is this a screen cast or are you going to tell me something interesting already?”
M: “Well hang on for just a few seconds more. I wrote my first simple route, to verify it. And I’m glad I did.”
var app = require("koa")();
var route = require("koa-route");
// routes
app.use(route.get("/", function *(){ this.body = "Yup, it's working!"}));
// start it
app.listen(3000);
console.log("App listening... http://localhost:3000");
H: “I’m borderline bored…”
M: “And then! I fired it up as normal: node --harmony app.js. You know what happened?”
H: “If you say ‘It worked, because Koa is awesome’ I’m leaving.”
M: “Eeeh, well it worked. Until I hit the route, http://localhost:3000/. Then it spit out an error like this:”
/Volumes/Storage/Users/marcus/Projects/Koa/booooring.com/node_modules/koa/node_modules/co/index.js:47
return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
^
ReferenceError: Promise is not defined
at Object.co (/Volumes/Storage/Users/marcus/Projects/Koa/booooring.com/node_modules/koa/node_modules/co/index.js:47:14)
H: “Ok, you’re running on the wrong version of Node.”
M: “No - I’m running version v0.11.12, installed using the awesome nvm, of course.”
H: “Of course. But what was it then?”
M: “Well dissecting the error it seemed like it needed Promise, whatever that is.”
H: “Ok, so it’s something you npm install, I guess?”
M: “Maybe, but why did this happen all of a sudden? I have loads of Koa apps running. For no particular reason I happened to check the package.json of Koa. You know what?”
H: “What?”
M: “They’ve updated the Node version needed for Koa. It’s now 0.11.13.”
H: “And you were running on?”
M: “v0.11.12. I nvm install v0.11.14 (that is the stable version) and it worked again.”
H: “But how on earth should you know. I think Koa should tell you when you start an app.”
M: “ME TOO! I actually regged an issue about that. And boy was that embarrissing?”
H: “Huh? How come? Are they mean?”
M: “No, super nice guys, but apparently this is already in place. You do get a warning…. but not from Koa.”
H: “Not from Koa? So who … aaaaah npm?”
M: “Yup - scrolling back up… sure enough I saw it. Not really right in front of my eyes but still… Read the manual, dude!”
H: “But now wait a second… what if I cannot change the version of node? If it’s on a server that I don’t control or something. Talk about breaking change!”
M: “Well… the nice Koa-guys showed me a trick. First install something called bluebird, with npm install bluebird --save. Then add this line at the top of you app.js:”
global.Promise = require('bluebird');
M: “And then it started to work as well… but really you should try to keep to the right version. And read the npm log…”
H: “I guess so…”