Hello World with NodeJS

This quick start will help you create a NodeJS application using projen's NodeJS project. To begin, make sure you have the version of NodeJS you want to use set up in your terminal. Running which node in bash/zsh/other POSIX shells, or Get-Command node in Powershell, should print the path to the NodeJS version you want to use. nvm is a popular tool for managing multiple versions of Node on a single machine. To select a version, run nvm use <version>.

To create a new NodeJS project, use npx projen new node:

npx projen new node --name=my-project

This will synthesize a standard project directory structure. Notably, the projen NodeJS project will not create sample code for you by default - you need to add your src or other code directory, as well as any tests and test libraries you want.

To add libraries, open .projenrc.js and add them to the deps array. For example, to add the aws-sdk library, add the following line to .projenrc.js:

const project = new NodeProject({
  // ...
  deps: ["aws-sdk"],
  // ...
});

Then re-run npx projen to install the library.

The Jest test framework can be added by adding the jest library to the devDeps array:

const project = new NodeProject({
  // ...
  devDeps: ["jest"],
  // ...
});

Again, re-run npx projen to install the libraries.

That's it! The NodeJS project is very basic, but serves as the base class for many other types of JavaScript or TypeScript projects.