Require own files

In this section, you will learn how to use require() to load in other files that you created inside your project. This will let you move functions outside app.js into more specific files; this will make your application easier to scale, test, and update. To get started, the first thing we'll do is to make a new file.

Making a new file to load other files

In the context of our notes app, the new file will store various functions for writing and reading notes. As of now, you don't need to worry about that functionality, as we'll get into the detail later in the section, but we will create the file where it will eventually live. This file will be notes.js, and we'll save it inside the root of our application, right alongside app.js and greetings.txt, as shown here:

For the moment, all we'll do inside notes is to use console.log to print a little log showing the file has been executed using the following code:

console.log('Starting notes.js');

Now, we have console.log on the top...