Book Image

Node Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Bethany Griggs
4 (1)
Book Image

Node Cookbook - Fourth Edition

4 (1)
By: Bethany Griggs

Overview of this book

A key technology for building web applications and tooling, Node.js brings JavaScript to the server enabling full-stack development in a common language. This fourth edition of the Node Cookbook is updated with the latest Node.js features and the evolution of the Node.js framework ecosystems. This practical guide will help you to get started with creating, debugging, and deploying your Node.js applications and cover solutions to common problems, along with tips to avoid pitfalls. You'll become familiar with the Node.js development model by learning how to handle files and build simple web applications and then explore established and emerging Node.js web frameworks such as Express.js and Fastify. As you advance, you'll discover techniques for detecting problems in your applications, handling security concerns, and deploying your applications to the cloud. This recipe-based guide will help you to easily navigate through various core topics of server-side web application development with Node.js. By the end of this Node book, you'll be well-versed with core Node.js concepts and have gained the knowledge to start building performant and scalable Node.js applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Building web applications with Fastify

Fastify is a web framework inspired by other popular Node.js web frameworks, including Hapi and Express.js. As the name may suggest, Fastify focuses on minimizing performance overhead, but the framework also has developer experience in mind.

While Fastify can be used to create web applications, it really excels when you're building JSON-based APIs. In the recipe, we'll create a JSON-based API.

Getting ready

First, let's create a directory named fastify-app to hold our project. As we'll be using modules from npm, we'll also need to initialize a new project as follows:

$ mkdir fastify-app
$ cd fastify-app
$ npm init --yes

Now that we've initialized our project directory, we can move on to the recipe.

How to do it

In this recipe, we will create a web server with Fastify that responds on the / route with some JSON data:

  1. Start by installing fastify:
    $ npm install fastify
  2. Next, we'll...