Efficient Node.js

Chapter 5. Package Management

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In Chapter 1, we briefly learned about Node’s default package manager, npm. It’s now time to take a deeper look and get comfortable finding, using, and creating packages for Node.

The term package is what the software world uses to describe a folder that contains code. In Node, that folder will also have a package.json file that describes the metadata and dependencies of the package.

The term module refers to a single file or a collection of related files that encapsulate a set of functionality. Modules allow developers to organize their code into separate and reusable units. A Node package often represents a single Node module, but some packages have more than one module.

A package usually refers to external code that a project depends on, but I think a better word to describe package code is generic. You can make pieces of your own code generic and extract them into a package that you can then ...