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 Rush for larger repositories

While Lerna provided a lot of the utility that made monorepos possible at all, its configuration and flexibility also posed some challenges. Furthermore, finding best practices proved to be difficult. Consequently, plenty of quite opinionated alternatives to using Lerna have been born. One of the most successful ones is Rush from Microsoft.

Rush allows a variety of npm clients to be used. Classically, Rush used to be npm-only. Today, Rush recommends using pnpm, which is also the default client when setting up a monorepo with Rush.

To work efficiently with Rush, a global installation of the tool is recommended:

$ npm install -g @microsoft/rush

After a successful installation, the rush command-line utility can be used. As with npm, an init subcommand to actually initialize a new project exists:

$ rush init

This will create and update a couple of files. Most notably, you’ll find a rush.json file in the current folder....