Additional Information

Installing Node.js

Being cross-platform, Node.js is available on a number of different operating systems. Head over to their download page here to download it on your machine. You can choose between the LTSLong-Term Support and the latest version.

This course was written with Node.js 14.8, which was the latest version at the time of writing.

Installing packages

It is very easy to search for packages on the npmjs website. Most packages have very resourceful pages with links to the official documentation and the github pages. You can install packages using the following command.

npm install <package>
// for nodemon
npm install nodemon

To install a specific version of a package we can use the following command:

npm install <package>@<version>
// for nodemon
npm install nodemon@1.18.7

We can also specify the latest version of a minor or a patch if we want. Let’s say we want nodemon 1.19, and we don’t care about the patch. We can get the latest version of the patch by using the ~.

// for nodemon
npm install nodemon@~1.18.7

This will install the latest version of 1.18, which is 1.18.11. We can do the same for the latest minor version using ^.

// for nodemon
npm install nodemon@^1.18.7

This will install version 1.19.4 of nodemon, even though version 2.0.4 exists. The ^ gets the latest version of the minor, whilst keeping the major the same.

Here is a list of a few other flags for install.

Flags	Explanation
-P, --save-prod	This is the default behavior. This will save the package in your dependencies.
-D, --save-dev	This will save the package in your devDependencies.
-O, --save-optional	This will save the package in your optionalDependencies.
--no-save	The package will not be saved as a dependency.

Packages can be uninstalled using the uninstall command. We can use the same flags as the install command; however, instead of saving the package, we can choose to remove the package from our dependencies with the flags.

Updating packages

Packages can be updated easily with npm. We can use the update command to update the packages.

npm update

The update command has a couple of flags that can be used to modify its behavior. The --dev flag also updates the devDependencies. The -g flag will update globally installed packages.

Docs

You can view the official documentation here. Since Node.js is always improving and getting new features, the documentation can be really useful for staying up to date. This website provides a nice overview of all the supported ECMAScript features in various versions of Node.js.