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

Using the AVA test runner

AVA is a modern test runner for Node.js. It stands out because of its ability to embrace new JavaScript language features and cutting-edge properties of Node.js, such as process isolation. In this way, AVA executes tests very quickly and reliably.

To use AVA, you need to install the ava package from npm:

$ npm install ava --save-dev

This allows you to use the ava command-line utility. Ideally, run it with npx as we did with the other tools:

$ npx ava

While Mocha and Jest could also be installed globally, AVA only works in projects as a local dependency. As this is the better setup anyway, there should be no practical downside from this constraint.

As mentioned, AVA is built quite closely on Node.js – following its conventions and rules wherever possible. In this regard, AVA also allows us quite quickly to adapt ESM instead of CommonJS. By modifying package.json for the project, we get immediate support for using ESM in our tests, too...