Now that we have our node-web-server directory, we'll install Express so we can get started making our web server. In the Terminal we'll run the clear command first to clear the output. Then we'll run the npm install command. The module name is express and we'll be using the latest version, @4.16.0. We'll also provide the save flag to update the dependencies inside of our package.json file as shown here:
npm install express@4.16.0 --save
Once again we'll use the clear command to clear the Terminal output.
Now that we have Express installed, we can actually create our web server inside Atom. In order to run the server, we will need a file. I'll call this file server.js. It will sit right in the root of our application:
This is where we'll configure the various routes, things like the root of the website, pages like /about, and so on. It's also where we'll start the server, binding it to a port on our machine. Now we'll be deploying to a real server. Later we'll talk about how that works. For now, most of our server examples will happen on our localhost.
Inside server.js, the first thing we'll do is load in Express by making a constant called express and setting it equal to require('express'):
const express = require('express');
Next up, what we'll do is make a new Express app. To do this we'll make a variable called app and we'll set it equal to the return result from calling express as a function:
const express = require('express');
var app = express();
Now there are no arguments we need to pass into express. We will do a ton of configuration, but that will happen in a different way.