Introduction
In the previous lessons, you got up and running with Node. You learned how to serve up a multi-page website and read/write data from files on the server. You probably found that while it wasn’t too difficult, the code was verbose and a little complicated. However, you can easily see how complicated and hard to maintain things would get if you decided to start adding more features. Express is a tiny framework that makes the things you did in the previous lessons even quicker and simpler, and does so in a way that makes projects even more easily extensible.
In this section, we are going to be following MDN’s Express Local Library tutorial. We’ll go one lesson at a time, occasionally supplementing with a little deeper explanation or side projects to help you deepen your understanding of the material. There is a ton of information there, so be sure to take your time and READ EVERYTHING. The blue “notes” that are scattered throughout the tutorial often link to articles or other tutorials that will definitely improve your understanding of the content. Don’t be lazy!
Lesson overview
This section contains a general overview of topics that you will learn in this lesson.
- Describe Express and Node’s main benefits.
- Describe the relationship between Node and Express.
- Explain what a module is and how Express fits in.
- Import and create modules.
- Describe asynchronous APIs.
- Describe and create route handlers.
- Describe and use middleware.
- Describe error handling in Express.
- Describe what the main parts of an Express app might look like.
- Describe Express development environment.
- Import Express into an application using NPM.
- Create and run applications using the Express application generator tool.
- Set up a development environment for Express on your computer.
Assignment
- Read MDN’s introduction to Express/Node. It is long but its main purpose is to show you the various bits and pieces that you’ll be learning in the rest of the tutorial. If you want you can code along a bit, but most of the examples aren’t really intended for you to follow 100%. DO read the entire thing! Some of it will be a review, but that’s OK! Follow the links that they give and at least look at them. They are a vital part of this lesson and will often direct you to the relevant portion of the official express docs (which are quite good)! You’ll want to be somewhat familiar with them when it comes time to do your own projects.
- The second lesson, “Setting up a Node development environment”, walks you through setting up Node and NPM. If you’ve come this far, you should already have both set up. Still go through the Using NPM and Installing the Express Application Generator sections of this lesson as you’ll learn more about installing and getting started with Express.
- Once you’re all set up, take a look at the Node site you created in our first project. Rewrite it using express! You should be able to do this with just one app.js file and a few
app.get()s.
Knowledge check
The following questions are an opportunity to reflect on key topics in this lesson. If you can’t answer a question, click on it to review the material, but keep in mind you are not expected to memorize or master this knowledge.
Additional resources
This section contains helpful links to related content. It isn’t required, so consider it supplemental.
- The book Express in Action by Evan M. Hahn is an incredible resource for Express beginners.
- This video crash course on Express by Brad Traversy provides you with all the basic concepts.
- Web Dev Simplified’s Express JS crash course also packs a ton of great information into a 35 minute video.