Installing Node and NPM

Node is the runtime that allows us to run JavaScript code on a server. It has gained massive favor over the last few years and is powering applications in almost every sector of technology. It is also one of the runtimes that can be chosen on Lambda functions.

Along with Node, we get Node Package Manager (npm), which is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world. This is great for us and we'll be using some of these packages throughout this book.

To install Node and npm you can download the installation packages from nodejs.org or through a package manager. Make sure that you install at least version 8.11.1 because we will be using async/await in our work, and this requires at least version 8. Once you have installed everything you can test that it's working by typing node -v ; you should get something like v8.11.1. You can also test npm by typing npm -v.