Project Setup: Part Two
Explore how to continue setting up a Node.js project by installing Express and managing dependencies using npm. Understand creating a .gitignore file to exclude node_modules and environment variables from Git. Learn to organize server-side code in a src folder and configure a basic Express server running on port 8080. This lesson prepares you to build a RESTful API with Express effectively.
The following tasks continue where we left off in the previous lesson.
Task 3: Install project dependencies
Let’s install Express for our project as follows:
What does running the above command create in our folder?
A new folder called node_modules is created. It’s the folder where npm installs the packages the project needs, such as dependencies.
The express package is installed in the current file tree under the node_modules subfolder.
As this happens, npm also adds the express entry in the dependencies property of the package.json file present in the current folder.
Finally, a package-lock.json file is also created.
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