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

Setting up Prettier and EditorConfig

Prettier is a code formatter that works with a lot of different source files. Among the supported file types, we have plain JavaScript, Flow, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, SASS, Markdown, and many more. Prettier is also integrated into many different editors such as Atom, Emacs, Sublime Text, Vim, Visual Studio, or VS Code.

Let’s dig into installing and configuring the Prettier formatter:

  1. Such as the previous tools, Prettier can be installed locally or globally. Adding Prettier to an existing project can be done by installing the prettier package from the npm registry:
    $ npm install prettier --save-dev
  2. Prettier can format JavaScript code even without any configuration. To run Prettier on an existing code file, you can use the prettier utility with npx. For instance, to apply formatting to your previous code file, you can run:
    $ npx prettier index.js
    export function div(a, b) {
      return a / b;
    }

In this case, Prettier just...