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

Managing a monorepo with Nx to enhance Lerna

Earlier in this chapter when we discussed Lerna, one thing we did not mention is that there is a special key in lerna.json, which is called useNx and configured to be true. This is a new addition to Lerna 5, which is now maintained by the people behind Nx – another popular solution for managing monorepos. So, what does this actually bring and how can it enhance Lerna – or any other monorepo management tool?

With Lerna or without?

Nx does not depend on Lerna and the use of Nx within Lerna is also optional. Therefore, the two technologies can be seen as non-exclusive – rather, they complete each other. In the end, it is your choice to decide which technologies you’d like to use. The example in this section, for instance, does not use Lerna.

We start with a new repository again. This time, we’ll use the nx-workspace npm initializer provided by Nx:

$ npm init nx-workspace -- --preset=react

 Workspace...