What is NPM??

NPM stands for Node Package Manager and is a software registry for javaScript packages. NPM comes "packaged" with NodeJS, so you have to install node before you can use npm.  Once node is installed npm comes with its own CLI (command line interface) we will use to access, manage and install 3rd party packages we will need for our project.

If we are creating a new project, we will need to initialize the project by typing the init command below into the command line terminal in the root location of our project.

 $ npm init

This will walk us through the process of creating a package configuration file. This file holds all the configurations for our new node project. Below is an example of how the file will look after you have completed the npm init process

What is NodeJS

Now more than ever developers are using Node.js to to configure run and build their websites. Node, according to their site, is a JavaScript (js) runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Node is NOT a framework or coding language, the language is JavaScript, only it runs on your machine or container as a service instead of how it traditionally runs on the browser. In a nutshell, it allows you to run js on your server.

I will leave some links at the bottom of this article for you to dive deeper if you want, but we are just going to scratch the surface of node's capabilities in this article.