Now that you have a better understanding about what Express.js is, let’s build something with it! Setting up the initial projectīefore you can start using Express.js to build a back-end you need to set up your project folder, add your dependencies, and initialize your git repository (assuming you’re using git). Express.js gives us the “E” in the MEAN stack, MERN stack, or MEVN stack. For this reason, it is a staple in many developer’s toolkits.

The ability to structure your back-end any way you want means that it can be as flexible as you need it to be. There are even other Node.js frameworks built on top of it, such as Sails.js, Koa.js, and Nest.js.ĭespite the number of tools it provides, it is a very unopinionated framework. Because of it’s maturity and ease of use, Express.js has been the most popular Node.js framework for years. It includes routing, simple setup for templating, and many more benefits. What is Express.js?Įxpress.js is a framework for Node.js to provide developers with robust tools for building a back-end for a website or web application. To combat this, Express.js was created in 2010 to give developers tools to stand Node.js back-ends up in no time. Using it as a back-end required configuration and a lot of code, making it challenging to get up-and-running in a short amount of time. The ability to use JavaScript for a back-end was a game changer, although it wasn’t without challenges. It’s a runtime environment which allows a server to interpret and run JavaScript code like a browser would. Unlike other back-end technologies such as PHP or Java, Node.js isn’t a language. Node.js burst onto the scene in 2009 when Ryan Dahl pulled the JavaScript engine out of a browser and put it onto a server. We will go over starting the server, setting up simple routes, and outputting various types of data. In this post, I’m going to show you how to create a basic Express.js server for your web applications.

Express server