In the last tutorial, we have seen how to install NodeJS and start a new project on your machine.
https://ecency.com/hive-196387/@igormuba/javascript-first-steps-installing-node

On this one let's choose a code editor and install an npm package. Packages are code written by other devs to make your job easier. You could write it all by yourself, but by using packages you can skip the boring and repetitive stuff and focus on the functionality of what you are creating.

Install VS Code

VS Code is my favorite code editor, it is lightweight, intuitive, and widely adopted, which makes it easy to find resources about it online.

The installation is straightforward for every major operating system and you can get it from their website:
https://code.visualstudio.com/

NPM and packages

If you have followed the last tutorial you should have a folder where you created a new NPM project.
If you did not, do it:
https://ecency.com/hive-196387/@igormuba/javascript-first-steps-installing-node

NPM is my package manager of choice, there is also Yarn but I won't get into that in this tutorial.

Go to the NPM package explorer at https://www.npmjs.com/ and search for express:

The first result of the search is the package we want

Installing the ExpressJS package

On the ExpressJS page, you can find the documentation and more information about the package.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/express

To install it, using the terminal on your computer, access the directory of your npm project and run the command npm i express and it should automatically install and configure. Be careful to run inside the folder of your project. You will only need to do this once in the lifetime of your project in your computer (if you upload or send it to someone else they will need to do that).

The command npm i express is the same for any operating system, if you have Node/NPM in your machine, but some packages on Windows need to be installed from the windows command prompt, while others can be installed through git-bash, which I prefer to use, although it has some issues.

If you have VS Code installed properly, you can type code . on the terminal to open the VS Code editor in the folder you are at. From there you can see what was installed under node_modules

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