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  5. Node.js vs npm

Node.js vs npm

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Node.js
Node.js
Stacks200.4K
Followers164.5K
Votes8.5K
GitHub Stars114.1K
Forks33.7K
npm
npm
Stacks137.4K
Followers82.2K
Votes1.6K
GitHub Stars17.6K
Forks3.0K

Node.js vs npm: What are the differences?

Node.js and npm are two popular technologies used in web development. While both are used to create dynamic web applications, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Execution Environment: Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that executes code on the server side, allowing developers to build scalable network applications. On the other hand, npm is a package manager for JavaScript that helps in managing and installing dependencies in a project.

  2. Main Function: Node.js allows developers to write server-side and networking applications using JavaScript, while npm focuses on managing and distributing reusable JS components or packages.

  3. Functionality: Node.js provides the necessary tools and libraries for building web servers, network applications, real-time chat applications, and more. On the other hand, npm provides a vast range of packages that can be easily integrated into projects, enhancing their functionality and productivity.

  4. Usage: Node.js is mainly used as a platform for developing server-side applications, whereas npm is primarily used for managing dependencies and sharing code between projects.

  5. Installation: Node.js is installed as a standalone runtime environment, while npm is included with the installation of Node.js. This means that when you install Node.js, you automatically get npm.

  6. Command Line Interface (CLI): Node.js provides a command line interface that allows developers to run JavaScript code directly in the terminal. On the other hand, npm provides a command line interface for managing packages and dependencies, allowing developers to install, update, and publish packages easily.

In summary, Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment used for building server-side applications, while npm is a package manager that helps in managing and sharing reusable JavaScript code. They have different main functions and usage, but they are often used together in web development projects.

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Advice on Node.js, npm

StackShare
StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsnpmnpmYarnYarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k
Comments
Mohammad
Mohammad

Oct 28, 2019

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsLaravelLaravelPHPPHP

I want to create a video sharing service like Youtube, which users can use to upload and watch videos. I prefer to use Vue.js for front-end. What do you suggest for the back-end? @{Node.js}|tool:1011| or @{Laravel}|tool:992| ( @{PHP}|tool:991| ) I need a good performance with high speed, and the most important thing is the ability to handle user's requests if the site's traffic increases. I want to create an algorithm that users who watch others videos earn points (randomly but in clear context) If you have anything else to improve, please let me know. For eg: If you prefer React to Vue.js. Thanks in advance

309k views309k
Comments
Oleksandr
Oleksandr

Senior Software Engineer at joyn

Dec 7, 2019

Decided

As we have to build the application for many different TV platforms we want to split the application logic from the device/platform specific code. Previously we had different repositories and it was very hard to keep the development process when changes were done in multiple repositories, as we had to synchronize code reviews as well as merging and then updating the dependencies of projects. This issues would be even more critical when building the project from scratch what we did at Joyn. Therefor to keep all code in one place, at the same time keeping in separated in different modules we decided to give a try to monorepo. First we tried out lerna which was fine at the beginning, but later along the way we had issues with adding new dependencies which came out of the blue and were not easy to fix. Next round of evolution was yarn workspaces, we are still using it and are pretty happy with dev experience it provides. And one more advantage we got when switched to yarn workspaces that we also switched from npm to yarn what improved the state of the lock file a lot, because with npm package-lock file was updated every time you run npm install, frequent updates of package-lock file were causing very often merge conflicts. So right now we not just having faster dependencies installation time but also no conflicts coming from lock file.

310k views310k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Node.js
Node.js
npm
npm

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
114.1K
GitHub Stars
17.6K
GitHub Forks
33.7K
GitHub Forks
3.0K
Stacks
200.4K
Stacks
137.4K
Followers
164.5K
Followers
82.2K
Votes
8.5K
Votes
1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1439
    Npm
  • 1279
    Javascript
  • 1129
    Great libraries
  • 1012
    High-performance
  • 805
    Open source
Cons
  • 46
    Bound to a single CPU
  • 45
    New framework every day
  • 40
    Lots of terrible examples on the internet
  • 33
    Asynchronous programming is the worst
  • 24
    Callback
Pros
  • 648
    Best package management system for javascript
  • 382
    Open-source
  • 327
    Great community
  • 148
    More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist
  • 112
    Nice people matter
Cons
  • 5
    Problems with lockfiles
  • 5
    Bad at package versioning and being deterministic
  • 3
    Node-gyp takes forever
  • 1
    Super slow

What are some alternatives to Node.js, npm?

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

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