Library Management System

A full-stack library app — browse a catalog, borrow and reserve books, leave reviews — built on the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js). It's the sample app used in MongoDB Developer Days hands-on labs, so the codebase intentionally shows off several MongoDB schema design patterns and MongoDB Search / MongoDB Vector Search side by side, not just CRUD.

Capabilities

• Browse, add, edit, and delete books, each with authors, genres, and free-form attributes (edition, ISBN, dimensions, MSRP)
• Borrow and return books, with due dates and history, or reserve a book that's currently checked out
• Leave and read reviews per book
• Role-based access: admin-only routes for managing inventory and borrow records
• Workshop labs for full-text and vector search over the book catalog, including prefiltering and scalar quantization variants of a Vector Search index

Architecture overview

flowchart LR
    Client["Angular client (client/)"] -- REST --> Server["Express API (server/)"]
    Server -- MongoDB driver --> Atlas[("MongoDB Atlas")]
    Server -- embeds via OpenAI / Vertex AI --> Embeddings["Embedding provider"]

Loading

The client is a standalone Angular SPA; the server is an Express + TypeScript API. The two talk over HTTP only — there's no server-side rendering or shared process. The server owns all MongoDB access; embedding generation for search is a pluggable provider selected at runtime (see AGENTS.md).

Quick start

Option A — GitHub Codespaces (recommended)

Click the badge above, or Code → Codespaces → Create codespace on main. The devcontainer will:

• Start a local MongoDB Atlas container and restore the sample library data
• Install server and client dependencies
• Open three terminal tabs running the server, the client, and port setup

Once it's done, open the forwarded port for 4200 (opens automatically).

Option B — Local machine

Prerequisites: Node.js 20+, npm, and a MongoDB cluster (an Atlas free tier (M0) cluster works, or a local mongod).

git clone git@github.com:mongodb-developer/library-management-system.git library
cd library
npm install

Set your connection details in server/.env (already committed with working defaults for a local database — edit DATABASE_URI if you're pointing at Atlas instead):

PORT=5400
DATABASE_URI=mongodb://localhost:27017
DATABASE_NAME=library
SECRET=secret

Start the server:

cd server && npm install && npm start

In a second terminal, start the client:

cd client && npm install && npm start

Open http://localhost:4200 — you should see the book catalog load.

MongoDB features demonstrated

Why MongoDB?

• Flexible schema for a catalog with wildly inconsistent source data. Books come with different attributes depending on edition and publisher; the Attribute Pattern stores those as key/value pairs instead of a rigid column set.
• Reads that don't fan out. A book page needs its authors and recent reviews in one round trip; the Extended Reference and Subset patterns duplicate just enough of that related data inline to avoid a join-like lookup on every page view.
• One collection instead of two nearly-identical ones. Borrowed books and reservations differ by only a few fields, so the Single Collection Pattern keeps them together and discriminates with a recordType field.
• Search and recommendations without a second database. MongoDB Search and MongoDB Vector Search run against the same books collection the app already reads and writes — no separate search cluster to keep in sync.

Contributing

Merge your own PR once you have at least one approval from a code owner.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Use at your own risk — not a supported MongoDB product.

Getting support

If you run into a problem working through this app, open a new issue.