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

Getting started with Express

Express is perhaps the most popular Node.js web app framework. Express is described as being Sinatra-like, which refers to a popular Ruby application framework. It is also regarded as not being an opinionated framework, meaning the framework authors don't impose their opinions about structuring an application. This means Express is not at all strict about how your code is structured; you just write it the way you think is best.

You can visit the home page for Express at http://expressjs.com/.

As of the time of writing this book, Express 4.17 is the current version, and Express 5 is in alpha testing. According to the Express.js website, there are very few differences between Express 4 and Express 5.

Let's start by installing express-generator. While we can just start with writing some code, express-generator provides a blank starting application, which we'll take and modify.

Install express-generator using the following commands:

$ mkdir fibonacci...