The JavaScript you are working on will likely be transformed and augmented before it makes it to production. At the very least, it will be checked for errors, minified, packaged, and so on. It will be deployed only after that. Deployment, therefore, follows a build step and how each step in the build is instrumented must be clearly defined.

Over time, certain patterns of development have emerged within the Node community. Many of these patterns map to other environments, while others are unique to the full-stack JavaScript Node.js world. The ability to run identical code on the client and server is perhaps the most prominent example. Because deployed codebases often contain the end result of transpilation (for example, CoffeeScript, and SASS), deployment workflows are assembled to run preprocessors, concatenate files, create source maps, compress images, and so on.

In this section, we will look at three technologies that are regularly seen in...