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 to the official registry

Let’s start by creating a small library that uses a structure that can be seen very often in Node.js projects. The structure consists of an src folder, where the original sources are located, and a lib folder, containing the output to be used by the target system. The target system could either be something such as a bundler for browser applications or a specific version of Node.js.

To initialize this kind of project, we can use the npm command-line utility as we did before:

$ npm init -y

Now, we’ll set everything up. First, we will install esbuild as a development dependency. This can be very helpful for transforming our source files into usable library files:

$ npm install esbuild --save-dev

Next, we change package.json to fit our needs:

package.json

{
  "name": "lib-test-florian-rappl",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": &quot...