Getting started with our application

Let's start developing our sample application with Node.js, which will read a log file and parse its information using a regular expression. We are going to create all the required code inside a JavaScript file, which we will name as regex.js. Before we start coding, we will perform a simple test. Add the following content inside the regex.js:

console.log('Hello, World!');

Next, in the terminal application, execute the regex.js command node from the directory that the file was created in. The Hello, World! message should be displayed as follows:

The hello world application with Node.js is created and it works! We can now start coding our application.

Reading a file with Node.js

As the main goal of our application is to read a file, we need the file that the application is going to read! We will be using a sample Apache log file. There are many files on the Internet, but we will be using the log file that can be downloaded from http://fossies.org/linux/source...