Creating Our npm Package

All projects—the work of creating APIs or applications in general—need more than just a list of modules used in that application. We need to handle building the code into something that can be released, testing and remote deployment, and/or local installation of the resulting application.

Most of the popular editing platforms integrated editing environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and others, have their own project management tools, too. That includes managing source code files, testing, building, and deployment. You may choose to use these platform tools instead of npm, and that’s fine. The important thing is that we use something that helps us keep everything related to our project organized and provides support for coding, building, testing, and releasing it in a safe and consistent way.

We can use the npm command-line utility to do the following tasks:

• Create an npm package
• Use npm to install other Node.js modules on our machine
• Edit our npm package file directly
• Use the npm start command to start our local Node.js application

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