Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

By : Florian Rappl
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

5 (1)
By: Florian Rappl

Overview of this book

Almost a decade after the release of Node.js, the tooling used by frontend developers is fully embracing this cross-platform JavaScript runtime, which is sadly often limited to server-side web development. This is where this Node.js book comes in, showing you what this popular runtime has to offer and how you can unlock its full potential to create frontend-focused web apps. You’ll begin by learning the basics and internals of Node.js, before discovering how to divide your code into modules and packages. Next, you’ll get to grips with the most popular package managers and their uses and find out how to use TypeScript and other JavaScript variants with Node.js. Knowing which tool to use when is crucial, so this book helps you understand all the available state-of-the-art tools in Node.js. You’ll interact with linters such as ESLint and formatters such as Prettier. As you advance, you’ll become well-versed with the Swiss Army Knife for frontend developers – the bundler. You’ll also explore various testing utilities, such as Jest, for code quality verification. Finally, you’ll be able to publish your code in reusable packages with ease. By the end of this web development book, you’ll have gained the knowledge to confidently choose the right code structure for your repositories with all that you’ve learned about monorepos.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Node.js Fundamentals
5
Part 2: Tooling
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Publishing npm Packages

Before now, our main focus has been to learn everything about improving and contributing to existing projects, but quite often, this is not everything. Some projects will need to be initiated correctly by you and one part of this process is to decide which packages should actually be reused.

We’ve already learned that reusability in Node.js is primarily gained through the module system, which can be enhanced by third-party dependencies in the form of npm packages. In this chapter, you’ll learn how you can publish npm packages yourself. This way, a functionality implemented once can be shared among the team working on the same project or with anyone.

To achieve our goal in this chapter, first, we’ll set up a simple library to serve our case well. Then, we publish this library to the official npm registry in a way that makes the code available to any Node.js developer. If you want to keep your library a bit less exposed, then the following...