I think Clementine is a wonderful starting place for the Full Stack Apps but many users are finding it to be unnecessary and unhelpful for the API projects. They are getting tripped up on things like authentication and MVC patterns, which aren't necessary for the API Projects.

Therefore, I'd like to suggest that the Clementine generator instructions are moved to a new step preceding the Full Stack projects. For the API Projects, either create a different boilerplate or provide none at all.

Maybe some instructions like this instead. This is what I've been recommending when campers come confused about Clementine for the API projects.

• Create a directory named for whatever your project is (e.g. time-server-api)
• Run npm init in the console and follow the prompts to set up your package.json file (most things you can leave as default)
• Run npm install express --save to insall express.js and save it as a dependency for your project.
• Add a .gitignore file to your directory which ignores the node_modules folder
• Run git init to initialize this as a git repository
• Create a file in your directory called server.js
• For the API projects you can write all your code in this file. For a starting place I recommend this as a simple example of node/express set up: http://expressjs.com/en/starter/hello-world.html

I was very confused on how to start after the Clementine tutorial, so jondcoleman's suggestion helped out a lot, so I think it would be useful if you included something like this before Clementine. Thumbs up

+1

Additionally, I didn't find Clementine.js a good starting point for the dynamic web projects. Its directory structure is heavily based on Angular. As we are supposed to develop the frontend component with React, a React specific version would be much more useful.

I agree with this as well. I got very confused when first encountering Clementine for API projects due to unknown components (Passport and Mongoose). I ended up stripping pretty much everything and working from server.js