Sasa Cvetkovic salesh

How to install Node.js applications, if you're not a Node.js developer

While installing a Node.js application isn't difficult in principle, it may still be confusing if you're not used to how the Node.js ecosystem works. This post will tell you how to get the application going, what to expect, and what to do if it doesn't work.

Occasionally an application may have custom installation steps, such as installing special system-wide dependencies; in those cases, you'll want to have a look at the install documentation of the application itself as well. However, most of the time it's safe to assume that the instructions below will work fine.

If the application you want to install is available in your distribution's repositories, then install it through there instead and skip this entire guide; your distribution's package manager will take care of all the dependencies.

Checklist

Things I believe

This is a collection of the things I believe about software development. I have worked for years building backend and data processing systems, so read the below within that context.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to let me know at @JanStette.

Fundamentals

Keep it simple, stupid. You ain't gonna need it.

Monads and Friends...

Over the last 24-48 hours, I've fielded quite a flurry of tweets related to a couple of threads I posted recently. Upon reflection on the feedback, especially the negative stuff, I decided to write this blog post to clarify a few things about my background on the topic, what I was trying to say, what I've done so far, and what I'm hoping to do (and learn!) in the future.

It's a bit of a lengthy read, but if you find you've got the time, I hope you'll read it.

To be clear, the feedback has been on a broad spectrum. A lot of it was actually quite positive, people thanking me and appreciating my continued efforts to try to make dev topics approachable. As a matter of fact, over the years, I've received boat loads of such positive feedback, and I'm tremendously grateful that I've had a helpful impact on so many lives.

But some of it veered decidedly the other direction. I'm deliberately not linking to it, because I don't want to either amplify or gang up on those folks. I'm offended an

Pure ESM package

The package that linked you here is now pure ESM. It cannot be require()'d from CommonJS.

This means you have the following choices:

Use ESM yourself. (preferred)
Use import foo from 'foo' instead of const foo = require('foo') to import the package. You also need to put "type": "module" in your package.json and more. Follow the below guide.
If the package is used in an async context, you could use await import(…) from CommonJS instead of require(…).
Stay on the existing version of the package until you can move to ESM.

Cheat sheet: Arrays

JavaScript Arrays are a very flexible data structure and used as lists, stacks, queues, tuples (e.g. pairs), etc. Some

Using Arrays

Creating Arrays, reading and writing elements:

Cheat sheet: strings

Strings are primitive values in JavaScript and immutable. That is, string-related operations always produce new strings and never change existing strings.

Working with strings

Literals for strings:

const str1 = 'Don\'t say "goodbye"'; // string literal

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	cd $(dirname $0)

	docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/home/rust/src -v cargo-git:/home/rust/.cargo/git -v cargo-registry:/home/rust/.cargo/registry -v "$(pwd)/target/":/home/rust/src/target ekidd/rust-musl-builder:nightly-2021-01-01 sudo chown -R rust:rust /home/rust/.cargo/git /home/rust/.cargo/registry /home/rust/src/target

	docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/home/rust/src -v cargo-git:/home/rust/.cargo/git -v cargo-registry:/home/rust/.cargo/registry -v "$(pwd)/target/":/home/rust/src/target ekidd/rust-musl-builder:nightly-2021-01-01 cargo build --release