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 Cypress for end-to-end testing

Cypress is a focused, end-to-end testing framework that also comes with the ability to test individual UI components. It tries to be different by mostly avoiding browser automation. Instead, its test runner is located directly inside the browser.

To use Cypress, you need to install the cypress package from npm:

$ npm install cypress --save-dev

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

$ npx cypress open

Cypress is at its heart a graphical tool. As such, we are first introduced to a small configurator that allows us to set up our project. The configurator is shown in Figure 7.2. Picking E2E Testing will give you the ability to influence what files are written:

Figure 7.2 – The Cypress configurator on opening it for the first time

The configurator also lets you pick a browser where the tests should actually be run. Right now, Chrome...