The Node.js ecosystem

Most languages aren't of the paradigm: of just writing self-contained code. Independent modules of code, called packages, are widely used in software engineering and development. To think of this in another way, even a fresh web server doesn't have software on it to serve a site out of the box. You have to install a package of software, such as Apache or nginx, to even get to the "Hello World!" step of a website. Node.js is no different. It has a number of tools to make the process of getting these packages simpler, though. Let's take a look from the ground up at a basic "Hello World!" example of a server using Node.js. We'll be discussing these concepts in more detail later, so, for now, let's just go through the basic setup.