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In the previous lesson, we successfully installed Node.js and npm in our system. Now we will use npm to create our first node project.

First project

Start your Node.js journey by creating a folder:

mkdir hello-node
cd hello-node

Then we run the npm init command, which is used to initialize a node project.

npm init

The generator will ask you a few questions, it’s OK to just press [enter] for all of them.

Then open the project folder in your favourite editor. If you have VS Code Editor, then just type the following command inside the project folder.

code .

The package.json file

In the editor, you would find that we’ve created a package.json file.

{
  "name": "hello-node",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

This file is the heart of a Node.js application. It contains a lot of meta-information about this project like the name of the project, description, current version, license, author of the project etc. And in future, once our project advances, we might need to install certain npm libraries. Then the package.json file will hold the list of all such dependencies for this project, with specific version numbers.

You can read more about package.json in this article.

Currently, the package.json file of node application points to non-existing index.js file and has no dependencies.

Let’s write some code

Let's get started by creating an index.js file, with a simple hello function.

function hello() {
  console.log("Hello Node.Js! Trying it for the first time");
}

hello();

This code would print some text to the console. Here we've used a function, just to add some more complexity, we could simply do console.log("Hello Node.js!") without writing any function as well.

Let’s run the code

The easiest way to run this program is by using the node <filename.js> command in the project directory:

node index.js

You should see the output, Hello Node.Js! Trying it for first time printed into the terminal. Congratulations! You just ran your first Node.js program!