If you haven't already, check out our page on NPM (the Node Package Manager) first! 👇

Intro to NPM

Introduction

<aside> 🏃 Node.JS allows developers (hey that's me! 🙋‍♀️) to run JavaScript outside the browser.

</aside>

What does that (👆) mean ?

The creators of JavaScript wrote it to run inside the web browser. Exclusively. Thanks to them, almost every browser today arrives on your desktop already packaged with a JavaScript "engine". This engine does two important things:

1. Interprets the JavaScript language into machine code.
2. Connects JavaScript to important parts of the browser:
   1. DOM — the Document Object Model — exposes the entire webpage (HTML, CSS, etc.) for manipulation with JS
   2. XMLHTTPRequest enables JavaScript developers to send their own HTTP requests

NodeJS actually uses the JavaScript engine used by Google Chrome, called V8.

Courtesy of Net Ninja[1]

But instead of connecting you — the JavaScripter — to a browser, NodeJS connects you to the entire computer. So when you write JavaScript with NodeJS, you can...

• create, delete, and modify files 🗃
• run servers! 🏃‍♀️ (👈 we like this one)
• make connections 👩🏾‍🤝‍🧑🏻 (🤷‍♀️ okay this one too)
• and like, so much more... 👀

Getting Started