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

Working with Lerna to manage monorepos

Lerna is one of the oldest tools for managing monorepos. We can even say to some degree that Lerna not only made monorepos manageable but also popular. Lerna is the backbone of some of the most important monorepos, such as Jest. It also was the original choice for projects such as Babel or React.

Originally, Lerna was mainly picked because it correctly installed and resolved all the packages. At this time, no package manager was capable of doing that intrinsically. However, today, Lerna is most often used together with the workspace features offered by the different package managers. Of course, you can still use the original mode of Lerna, where plain npm is used to install and link the different packages. So, how does Lerna fit into this new role when the whole installation is done by the chosen package manager anyway?

It turns out that Lerna is a really great task-running layer on top of a package manager. For instance, running a package...