In 1886, the first internal combustion engine-powered car was invented by Karl Benz. Soon, there were many cars that used the combustion engine, airplanes, motorbikes, and boats followed shortly after. People's ingenuity led to using the combustion engine in places that the inventor might not have imagined. The same happened to JavaScript. New JavaScript environments such as Node and npm are now available. JavaScript's home is in the browser. That's the environment in which it was used for several years. Essentially, it was a front end only language. Then in 2009, a developer named Ryan Dao decided to use Google's JavaScript V8 engine and make it work on the server. It's not always easy being an innovator. Many doubted whether it was even possible. However, the idea caught on and more people started getting on board. This is how Node.js was born and how JavaScript became a language for both front-end and back-end. Node.js is a separate standalone environment. This means that Node.js can run in multiple settings. For example, on the command line, in a desktop application, or on the back end of a web app. Before the introduction of Node.js, developers had to build backends in other technologies and languages such as PHP, Python, C-sharp, Ruby, and Java. After Node.js became available, it was possible to use JavaScript on the backend or on the server-side. This means that today you can write full-stack JavaScript programs. In other words, you can write JavaScript on the client and on the server. Node.js comes with a package manager called npm, which stands for Node Package Manager. The package manager allows you to use a large number of libraries and frameworks as Node.js modules. An npm module is a standalone piece of code that has been published on the npm website. Sometimes an npm module is also referred to as an npm package. Now that you've learned about Node.js, you may be wondering how you can use it locally. Node.js and npm are either pre-installed on your machine, or you need to install them. Once installed, you can interact with Node.js and npm from the command line. For example, you can run the node command inside your computer's command line. This is also called a shell, or a terminal. In the same way, you can run the npm command. You may be wondering why you need to run those commands. Well, this is because you use the node command to run a JavaScript file, or to directly execute JavaScript code. You use the npm command to install any node module from the npm repository. For example, you could install the module named lowercase. Once installed, you can import this module and use its functions to transform strings to lowercase in your code. When you want to start a new project, first, open a folder on your machine where you want to place your project files, then run the npm command. These projects can be different shapes and sizes, but they all have at least one thing in common, the package.json file that gets created after you run the npm command. The package.json file holds all the instructions on all the node modules that are pulled from the npm repository of open source modules. There are about 11 million modules in the npm repository. It means that you can get thousands of hours worth of other developers' coding by running the npm install command and adding the package name. Examples of libraries you can install include React, Webpack, Bootstrap, and Angular Core. The package.json file updates when you install a new package. It keeps track of everything you need to have installed in your project. This makes such projects easily portable. For example, if you have built a project with a specific number of different node packages, they're all listed inside the package.json file. All you need to do is share this file with, for example, your co-workers. They can have the exact same setup on their machines simply by running the command npm install. This install command reads the contents of the package.json and installs all the necessary packages, also referred to as dependencies. Sometimes dependencies also come with their own dependencies. It often happens that when you run the npm install command, several 100 megabytes worth of node packages get installed into your project under the node modules folder. In this video, you learned about the origins of Node.js. You should also be able to describe what Node.js and npm are and how to use the basic Node and npm commands on the command line.
