Create Your First Server Using Node.js & Express

Let’s create our first Node.js server using express framework

Prerequisite

• Git Bash or Terminal
• Node.js should be installed
• Your favourite text editor mine is VsCode

Let’s get our hand dirty with npm

• Open CMD or Terminal in your system and make first make a workspace $ mkdir first_server
• Now navigate to our workspace $ cd first_server
• Now its time to initialize npm in our project to keep track of all dependency via package.json file fire command $ npm init
• Provide the required data by npm init and this command will create a package.json file in working directory
• package.json will look like :

Let’s get our hand dirty with Express

Express

Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js - Express

• Adding Express to your project is only an NPM install away:

  $ npm install express --save
  

• One of the most powerful concepts that Express implements is the middleware pattern.

  Middlewares

  You can think of middlewares as Unix pipelines, but for HTTP requests.

In the diagram we can see how a request can go through an Express application. It travels to three middlewares. Each can modify it, then based on the business logic either the third middleware can send back a response or it can be a route handler.

• Let’s write code for server using express middlewares

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 8000;

app.get("/",(req,res)=>{
return res.send("<h1>Hello World from our first Server</h1>")
});

app.listen(PORT,(err)=>{
if(err){
    console.log('Error in creating server',err);
}
else{
    console.log('Server is running at port: ',PORT);
}
});

Now open terminal and fire command node index.js and open browser and search for http://localhost:8000 or http://127.0.0.1:8000/ Bam in browser you will see Hello World from our first Server

Happy Coding