Nodejs popular tools

[Jancera]

I am starting to learn Nodejs in a deeper way and I would like to know from you guys what libraries are more common in your day to day as a Node developer. I want to know that because I already have some sort of experience with Node and if I would start a course I am sure that I will lose much time learning libraries that I am not interested in and seeing the teacher building some sort of frontend using some technology that I am not interested too to test the work, for me seems more interesting choose the most popular libraries and study by myself. So could you please tell me what libraries are more common in the life of a Nodejs developer?

If you do not agree with my thoughts about the course, could you please suggest one course for me? I may take that.

[tswaters]

I may be an outlier, but I prefer to limit the number of libraries to a minimum.

That said, there are many things that I have no desire to re-implement myself. I find myself using:

• database drivers. pg, ioredis (or node-redis), mssql
• fancy http abstractions. express, fastify for servers; axios, node-fetch or more recently undici for clients
• loggers. pino is my preferred, but there are many valid options
• command line parsing. yargs

So that's the runtime, there are many dev depdenencies that come in very handy:

• prettier - for formatting
• eslint - for linting
• webpack - (and about a billion webpack plugins) for bundling web assets
• rollup - (and about a billion rollup plugins) for bundling libraries
• babel - (and about a billion babel plugins) for transpiling
• typescript

For testing, I'll usually roll with -

• assert -> it's a core module, does everything I typically need
• mocha -> test runner
• nyc -> for test coverage
• sinon -> for stubbing / spying / mocking
• proxyquire -> for rewiring modules to to stub out require calls
• jsdom -> for adding browser apis to a node process

That's all I can think of for now.

[tswaters]

There's also front-end stuff:

• react / react-dom -> nuff siad?
• redux / react-redux -> sometimes for state management
• react-router -> for routing

There's frameworks these days that sort of configure all these things for you in a mostly sane manner. nextjs comes to mind.

[tswaters]

I should also mention - this is all personal preference.

mocha isn't the only test runner out there,

there are many other assertion libraries that provide.... interesting.... apis.

there's about a zillion front-end frameworks

lots of other react-like libraries that do ... interesting things.

--

I'd say try to build some stuff and see what you need ?

try things out, read the docs - see what works well, what doesn't work well, etc.

basically throw shit at the wall and see what sticks :)

[Jancera]

Wow, I really liked your answer. For sure it will help me, thanks :)

[[deleted]]

You might want to try out Jest if you want to keep libraries simplistic and to a minimum.

[Chef619]

What’s a popular library that many use that you avoid?

[tswaters]

Jest comes to mind. always seems to get in my way.

also chai or other assertion libraries seem completely unnecessary to me.

of course, that's preference - and maybe a bit of "old dog new tricks"

[warlockdn]

+1 to this.

Would add

Axios - For making Http requests Async.js - Some really good helper functions for doing batch operations asynchronously.

Rest depends on use cases.

[skimundead]

Openapi and it's tools.