The interest in the MEAN Stack (Mongo-Express-Angular-Node) seems to have peaked in May 2016 according to Google Trends. While I can imagine a multitude of reasons for this (from Anguar now being Angular4 , to mean / meanjs.org being quite out of date or the rise of other frameworks / libs like ReactJS or MeteorJS) , it's still a viable full-stack-js solution. For me, however, with one big change: MEAN-JS becomes MEAN-TS (TS = Typescript).
The use of typescript is literally exploding at the moment. Angular is now completely written in typescript. So is RxJS. The list of projects migrating is long, which is a good thing for friends of typed languages. However, for the backend-part (Mongo-Express-Node) of the MEAN stack, I haven't found a good typescript boilerplate yet. By good I mean 100% typescript, including the unit tests. So I set out to create this boilerplate. And this is what's resulted from it.
First, get the code using
git clone https://github.com/bersling/typescript-mongo-express-angular-node-seed.git project-name
cd project-name
git submodule init
git submodule update
Then, since backend and frontend are well separated through a REST-API, they are also installed separately.
Check out the backend instructrions: https://github.com/bersling/typescript-mongo-express-node-seed
Check out the frontend instructions: https://github.com/bersling/typescript-angular-seed
I've documented the steps of the journey here: www.tsmean.com. This documenation might at some points be somewhat behind the actual repository.