Full-Stack Web Development with Vue.js and Node

Building an Express Application Chapter 2

Introducing Express.js

Express.js is a minimalist server-side web framework for Node.js. It is built on top of
Node.js to make it easy to manage the Node.js server. The most important strength of

Express.js is that it makes the routing very, very easy. The robust API that it provides is
very easy to configure. It is easy to receive requests from the frontend and easy to connect

to the database. Express.js is also the most popular web framework for Node.js. It uses the

Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern, which we will be discussing later on in this
chapter.

Installing Express.js

We have already covered how to install node modules via npm. Similarly, we can install

Express.js via NPM using this command:

$ npm install express

This is an easy way to install node modules. But, while building an application, we're going

to need lots of different kinds of modules. We will also want to share these modules across

our multiple applications. Hence, to make a module available globally, we will have to
install it globally. For that, npm provides the option of adding -g when installing node

modules. So, now we can use:

$ npm install -g express

This will install Express.js globally, which allows us to use the express command across

multiple applications.

Creating an Express.js application

Now that we have installed Express.js, let's get started creating an application using

Express.js.

We will name our application express_app. Building an outline of an express application

is very simple using the express command. We can simply use:

$ express express_app