Installing modules using npm

The module system in Node is so powerful that consuming a third-party module written by other developers is a piece of cake. Node includes its own package manager called npm, which is a registry that currently contains over 60,000 unique modules written in Node. These modules are completely open source and available to you via a few short commands. In addition, you can release your own personal modules via npm and allow anyone in the world to use your feature!

Let's say you wanted to include a popular web framework, Express, in your project (the one we will be using later in this book). There are simply two steps required to download a module and use it in your code:

$ npm install express
// ** file: usingnpm.js
var express = require('express');

And that's it! Literally, it's that simple! From the command-line of the folder where your project is located, simply execute npm install package-name, and the package will be downloaded from npm...