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What are these packages in mean stacks. I am playing around with meanio and it has its own packages and so does cleverstack with its modules. Why do we need them? More specifically they should be be node packages rather than packages specific to that particular stack?

Anoop
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FYI: I am one of the core developers of http://mean.io package system so feel free to ask away.

Installed mean.io packages via mean install command are essentially node_modules. For example if you look at http://mean.io/#!/packages you will see (currently) 3 packages. mean install <package> installs it in node_modules.

the /packages folder you see in the root allows you to create custom custom built as a package ready for reuse and/or distribution.

This allows the logic and features of projects to be clearly defined and most importantly, reusable. You can host your package on github or npm and share it with any other mean.io project. If built correctly it will work out of the box.

For example you build a unique footer that you use in all your projects. You can simply design it as a package and reuse it in all your projects.

We can see here a distinction between 'contributed/3rd party code' (coming from npm) and custom 'in-house' code in /packages.

Technically any packages within the /packages folder can be moved into node_modules if so desired but by convention it is frowned upon to make changes to installed npm modules within /node_modules

In addition to the structure of packages the mean.io package management system provides various abstracted tools to ease development and make the code more reusable. Checkout http://www.mean.io/#!/docs

If you have any other question feel free to join the "mean team" at

  1. our facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/mean.io/
  2. on our google group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/meanio
  3. open an issue on github https://github.com/linnovate/mean
  4. join our irc channel 'freenode' #meanio

Checkout this blog post by Lior Kesos on the 'packigination of everything'

Yonatan Ellman
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