Hello, Node!

Move over Hello World, say wassup to Hello Node!

Our goal is to output "Hello Node!" to the terminal console by running the following command: node index.js. Here are the steps we will go through to do this:

• Create a folder to hold our files
• Create the index.js file
• Add content to the index.js file

Create a folder to hold our files

First things first, let's whip open that terminal. Make sure you are in a location that you want to create your folder. A quick list of commands to help us navigate the terminal:

• ls list all files/folders in current directory
• cd /folder_name change directory into folder folder_name
• cd ../ change directory to go back to the parent directory of the current directory

Creating our folder

Now we can start to use nodes file system fs while getting the project set up. While we will be using this in the command line, we can just as easily write these in a file.

Now let's create a folder to hold our files:

node -e "fs.mkdirSync('hello_node')"

References:

• Node File System fs
• Create Folder method mkdirSync

Create the index.js file

Navigating to the correct location

Now we can run the ls command to list the files in the directory we are in, and we should see the newly created "hello_node" folder there.

Let's move into the newly created folder

cd hello_node

Creating the file

Then create a new file index.js:

node -e "fs.writeFileSync('index.js', '')" 

This creates an empty file names index.js, and its empty because we pass the data parameter an empty string.

References:

• Create File method writeFileSync

Add content to the index.js file

Now lets add some content to the file. We can do this using the same writeFileSync method.

node -e "fs.writeFileSync('index.js', \"console.log('Hello, Node!')\")"

This overwrites the content in our index.js file with console.log('Hello, Node!').

Now we can execute the index.js file from the terminal with:

node index.js

Which gives us the output of Hello, Node!.

What do we get out of doing this?

There are a few important fundamental concepts we are practicing here. It's not just to blindly check off your first "getting started" project.

1. Practicing navigating the terminal
2. Getting familiar with creating folders and files with node's file system library
3. Executing node commands in the terminal

It's easy enough to open your code editor, right-click to create a new folder, right-click to create a new file, and write the console.log('Hello, Node!') line in there.

Or even in the terminal to just write node -e "console.log('Hello, Node!')" to output Hello, Node! right there.

It's important to start to get comfortable navigating and using these methods in this article so that these fundamentals become second nature.

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For more Node.js articles, checkout Node.js Hands On