How to Add Keystone to an Already Existing Express App

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How to add keystone to an existing Express app

The idea here is to minimally add keystone to your app. This gives you an admin panel at '/keystone' and models(called lists in keystone). With this in place you can use keystone.list to access your data.

var express = require('express'),
    app = express(),
    keystone = require('keystone'),
    serve = require('serve-static'),
    favicon = require('serve-favicon'),
    body = require('body-parser'),
    cookieParser = require('cookie-parser'),
    multer = require('multer');

var cookieSecret = 'secretCookie';

app.use(cookieParser(cookieSecret));
app.use(body.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
app.use(body.json());
app.use(multer());

keystone.init({
  'name': 'Website Name',
  'brand': 'Website Brand',
  'session': false,
  'updates': 'updates',
  'auth': true,
  'user model': 'User',
  'auto update': true,
  'cookie secret': cookieSecret,
});

// Let keystone know where your models are defined. Here we have it at the `/models`
keystone.import('models');

// Serve your static assets
app.use(serve('./public'));

// This is where your normal routes and files are handled
app.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
  res.send('hello world');
});

keystone.set('routes', app);
keystone.start();

Caveats

• Running an express server is not necessary. If you try running Keystone and the express server on the same port, you'll run into a few errors
• Make sure to create folders for updates and models. You can copy the generated basic data from the Yeoman Generator
• Make sure you're using multer@0.1.8. The latest's multer's API changes. If you find yourself getting a TypeError app.use() middleware, this is the problem
• Make sure you set up your environment variables. If you want to use .env, add require('dotenv').load() to your index.js
• If you aren't getting anything back from your database, set a website {name,brand} (or manually set up your mongoose)

Errors

Error: cookieParser("secret") required for signed cookies Make sure you set a cookie secret inside cookieParser