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 Playwright for visual tests

Node.js is not only a great basis for running logical tests but also for verifying visuals, such as those of a website running in a browser. A modern approach for browser automation is Playwright.

To use Playwright, you need to install the playwright package from npm:

$ npm install playwright --save-dev

The playwright package enables you to use Playwright in an existing application, which could also be inside existing tests such as unit tests executed with Jest using the jest-playwright-preset package.

An even better setup can be achieved by using the @playwright/test test runner package:

$ npm install @playwright/test --save-dev

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

$ npx playwright test

Running this will look for all files matching the same conventions as previously noted in the Jest and AVA sections. Every file ending with .test.js or .spec.js...