Introduction

  • 1 minute

When you work on an application, you write code to implement business requirements. For the sake of speed and reliability, you and your team might not write all the code yourselves. You might rely on external code, or libraries, that someone else wrote.

One way to approach building your app with external libraries is to use an existing ecosystem of libraries that you can download from and possibly even add to. By using these libraries, you'll be able to finish building your app sooner and take it to market faster than the competition. Another benefit to using libraries could be to ensure your app follows recommended practices for authentication and authorization. After all, protecting your data and your customers' data is a significant concern.

In this module, you'll use the npm command-line tool and the npm global registry to add libraries to your application code. You'll also be introduced to managing updates and mitigating issues.

Learning objectives

After you complete this module, you'll be able to:

  • Use a dev container for your development environment
  • Initialize Node.js projects
  • Understand what the manifest file package.json consists of and use it to your advantage
  • Add packages to and remove packages from your Node.js project
  • Manage your package dependencies and update them in a predictable way

Prerequisites

  • Familiarity with editing text and code files in a text editor
  • Experience with using the command line, including using it for Git operations