How to make a basic website with Node, Express, and Pug

Create a new folder, and go into it.

mkdir simple-website && cd simple-website

Initialize a new Node project within the folder.
```
npm init
```
Fill out the info it asks you for. In most cases, the defaults will be fine. This will create a package.json file in the folder.
We are going to install a package called Express. It lets us get websites up and running quickly and easily. We are also going to install Morgan, a logger for Express.
```
npm install --save express morgan
```
Additionally, we are going to install Pug, an HTML template language.
```
npm install --save pug
```
Install nodemon, a program that watches your Node application during development, and restarts the server any time there are changes.
```
npm install -g nodemon
```

In your package.json, replace the contents of "scripts" with these commands.

{
    "watch": "nodemon server.js -e js,pug", // runs nodemon to watch for server updates
    "start": "node server.js" // runs the server without nodemon
}

Make a new file called server.js, and paste in the following code:

// require all dependencies
var express = require('express');
var logger = require('morgan');
var app = express();

// add logging and static middleware to express
app.use(logger('dev'));

// set up the template engine
app.set('views', './views');
app.set('view engine', 'pug');

// GET response for '/'
app.get('/', function (req, res, next) {

    try {

        // render the 'index' template, and pass in a few variables
        res.render('index', { title: 'Hey', message: 'Hello there!' });

    } catch (e) { // if there are any errors, send them off the the logger
        next(e);
    }

});

// start up the server
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, function () {
    console.log('Listening on http://localhost:' + (process.env.PORT || 3000));
});

Make a new folder called views, and within it make a new file called **index.pug*. In that file, paste the following code:
```
html
    head
        title= title
    body
        h1= message
```

This is essentially equal to writing:

```
<html>
    <head>
        <title>title</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>message</h1>
    </body>
</html>
```

But as you can see, the Pug version is much shorter and easier to read (plus, we can easily pass in variables).

Start up your server with
```
npm run watch
```
In your browser, go to http://localhost:3000 to view your site. Try making changes to server.js and reloading the webpage to see it change.