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

Integrating Turborepo instead of or with Lerna

So far, we’ve seen quite a variety of tools in this chapter. While the workspaces feature of modern npm clients is already more than sufficient for smaller monorepos, larger ones require more dedicated tools to be manageable. In cases where Lerna is a bit too simplistic and Rush is too opinionated, another alternative exists – Turborepo, or Turbo for short. It can be seen as a replacement for or an addition to Lerna.

Starting from scratch is rather easy – Turbo comes with an npm initializer:

$ npm init turbo

This will open a command-line survey and scaffold the directory with some sample code. In the end, you should see a couple of new files being created, such as a turbo.json or a package.json file. Furthermore, Turbo creates apps and packages directories containing some sample code.

Let’s show the strength of Turbo by running the build script:

$ npx turbo run build

In contrast to Lerna, this...