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 a cross-platform tool

Node.js would not be so powerful without its ecosystem. As we learned in Chapter 1, Learning the Internals of Node.js, relying on the power of its ecosystem was an elementary design decision. Here, npm takes the leading role by defining the package metadata in package.json, as well as the installation of packages.

During the installation of a package, a couple of things are happening. After the package has been downloaded, it will be copied to a target directory. For a local installation with npm, this is the node_modules folder. For a global installation with npm, the target will be globally available in your home directory. There is, however, one more thing to do. If the package contains a tool, then a reference to the tool will be put into a special directory, which is node_modules/.bin for a local installation.

If you go back to the code from the previous chapter, you will see that, for example, jest is available in node_modules/.bin. This...