Loading and using modules

The Node designers believe that most modules should be developed in userland—by developers, for developers. Such an effort is made to limit the growth of the standard library. Node's standard library contains the following short list of modules:

Network and I/O	Strings and Buffers	Utilities
TTY UDP/Datagram HTTP HTTPS Net DNS TLS/SSL Readline FileSystem	Path Buffer Url StringDecoder QueryString	Utilities VM Readline Domain Console Assert
Encryption and Compression	Environment	Events and Streams
ZLIB Crypto PunyCode	Process OS Modules	Child Processes Cluster Events Stream

Modules are loaded via the global require statement, which accepts the module name or path as a single argument. You are encouraged to augment the module ecosystem by creating new modules or new combinations of modules.

The module system itself is implemented in the require (module) module.

Understanding the module object

A Node module is simply a JavaScript file expected to...