Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fifth Edition

By : David Herron
Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fifth Edition

By: David Herron

Overview of this book

Node.js is the leading choice of server-side web development platform, enabling developers to use the same tools and paradigms for both server-side and client-side software. This updated fifth edition of Node.js Web Development focuses on the new features of Node.js 14, Express 4.x, and ECMAScript, taking you through modern concepts, techniques, and best practices for using Node.js. The book starts by helping you get to grips with the concepts of building server-side web apps with Node.js. You’ll learn how to develop a complete Node.js web app, with a backend database tier to help you explore several databases. You'll deploy the app to real web servers, including a cloud hosting platform built on AWS EC2 using Terraform and Docker Swarm, while integrating other tools such as Redis and NGINX. As you advance, you'll learn about unit and functional testing, along with deploying test infrastructure using Docker. Finally, you'll discover how to harden Node.js app security, use Let's Encrypt to provision the HTTPS service, and implement several forms of app security with the help of expert practices. With each chapter, the book will help you put your knowledge into practice throughout the entire life cycle of developing a web app. By the end of this Node.js book, you’ll have gained practical Node.js web development knowledge and be able to build and deploy your own apps on a public web hosting solution.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Node.js
6
Section 2: Developing the Express Application
12
Section 3: Deployment

Running and testing commands

Now that you've installed Node.js, we want to do two things—verify that the installation was successful and familiarize ourselves with the Node.js command-line tools and running simple scripts with Node.js. We'll also touch again on async functions and look at a simple example HTTP server. We'll finish off with the npm and npx command-line tools.

Using Node.js's command-line tools

The basic installation of Node.js includes two commands: node and npm. We've already seen the node command in action. It's used either for running command-line scripts or server processes. The other, npm, is a package manager for Node.js.

The easiest way to verify that your Node.js installation works is also the best way to get help with Node.js. Type the following command:

$ node --help
Usage: node [options] [ -e script | script.js | - ] [arguments]
node inspect script.js [arguments]

Options:
-v, --version print Node.js version
-e, --eval...