Node.js is the darling of developers these days for scalable, efficient, and high-performance applications. It is because of the most important reason of having very powerful tools and libraries that make development much easier. If you are working on any kind of RESTful API, real-time chat application, or any type of microservices architecture, it will save you so much time and effort with these tools and libraries. Here is a list of some of the best Node.js tools and libraries every developer should know:
1. Express.js
Express is one of the leading Node.js frameworks. This library provides a minimalist, flexible approach towards building web applications and APIs. It has solid routing and middleware capabilities that help build lightweight and fast server-side applications.
2. Socket.IO
Real-time communications are facilitated by the Socket.IO library, which allows developers to work directly with WebSocket-based communications; it is best used for applications involved in chat applications, live notifications, and collaborative tools of all kinds.
3. PM2 (Process Manager 2)
PM2 is a process manager for Node.js applications. It manages, monitors, and deploys your apps in the easiest way possible. Your application runs without any interruption and does not cause downtime during the updating process.
4. Mongoose
Mongoose is the most important library used to work with MongoDB databases in Node.js. It is one of the easiest ways to access MongoDB; it has all the features for schema validation, middleware, and query building.
5. Passport.js
If you need authentication for users, use Passport.js. It provides lots of built-in authentication strategies that include OAuth, OpenID, as well as social logins from Google, Facebook, etc.
6. Nodemon
Nodemon is a dev tool that automatically restarts the Node.js application in case there are changes detected. This saves them time and avoids them having to re-restart the server in their own efforts.
7. Axios
Not exactly a Node.js library, but most definitely the most widely-used HTTP request library, Axios is not bad at all, with an amazingly small learning curve and promises are supported. This makes it very great for using in every aspect with RESTful APIs or external services.
8. Sequelize
Sequelize is an efficient ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) library for Node.js, making the interaction with SQL-based databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite a smooth sail. It follows clean syntax for database operations.
9. Jest
It is an exhaustive testing framework to test applications on Node.js. Jest is fast, stable, and offers some interesting features such as inbuilt test coverage reporting, mocking, etc.
10. Mocha
Mocha is the other good testing library for Node.js. It is so straightforward, providing an elegant yet flexible framework to write unit tests and becomes developers’ favorite due to minimalistic setup in testing.
11. Morgan
Morgan is the logging library that makes it easy for Node.js HTTP request logging. It keeps track of requests and responses in your app and hence becomes critical for debugging and monitoring purposes.
12. Lodash
Lodash is that utility library which provides very useful functions working with arrays, objects and strings. Common tasks become so much easier because of that. Your code will thus become cleaner and more efficient.
13. Bcrypt.js
Bcrypt.js is a fine, reliable library for the secure hashing of passwords. Being lightweight and easy to use, it would ensure that the authentication system in your application is safe yet efficient.
14. Async.js
Async.js is a utility module, making asynchronous operations easier to work with. It has methods that handle parallel and sequential workflows, which can be difficult in Node.js.
15. Cluster
The Cluster module in Node.js helps make the most of multi-core systems by spawning child processes. This boosts the scalability and performance of your applications when under heavy loads.
Conclusion : Node.js provides the richest set of tools and libraries
Node.js has the richest set of tools and libraries, which can be leveraged based on a wide range of developmental needs. Developers can now avail of these resources to create highly robust, scalable, and feature-rich applications much more efficiently. Saying that bringing all these in a workflow would make a developer even better is quite a gross understatement since his productivity would increase manifolds.
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