Efficient Node.js

Chapter 2. Scripts and Modules

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the second chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the author at [e-mail].

We used the node command briefly in Chapter 1 to explore Node’s REPL mode and execute simple scripts. In this chapter, we’ll learn how Node loads and executes scripts modules. We’ll start by exploring more of the options, arguments, and environment variables that can be used with the node command, and learn more about what we can do in a REPL session. Then we learn about the steps Node takes to load and execute a module.

Node CLI

The node command has many options that can be used to customize its behavior. It also supports arguments and environment variables to further customize what it does, and to pass data from the operating system environment to Node’s process environment.

Let’s take a look. In the terminal, type:

$ node -h | less

This will output the help documentation for the command (one page at a time because we piped the output on the less command). I find it useful to always get myself ...