Node.js is popular among developers as an asynchronous and event-driven language used for backend development.
It has a syntax easy enough to understand even for beginners.
In this post, were going to point out 10 best practices every Node developer should follow.
Especially, if the project is open source, so we need to be mindful of this possibility.
We can use two methods to prevent this clash of package versions.
One method is using–save-exactevery time youre installing and saving the package to the package.json file.
After coding for a while, this becomes a hassle preventing you from completely focusing on the given task.
It will guarantee the tool recovers without an issue after a runtime error.
Because, unfortunately, programmers are a very opinionated bunch.
And youll end up spending hours on this mundane, useless task.
it’s possible for you to even find an existing style guide used by other programmers.
We can use ESLint to validate the written code and Prettier for automatic formatting purposes.
This is what we call callback hell.
At this point, your code will be quite unreadable.
Use a proper logging tool
First off, console.log is not a proper logging tool.
Forget about using it for your applications every logging purpose.
Node has several dedicated logging frameworks you might use in your tool.
Winston, Bunyan, and Pino are a few examples of such tools.
you’ve got the option to test and select a one that suits your applications needs.
Dont forget to follow thebest logging practiceswhen creating a logging system using your selected tool.
Always venture to use const over let
Use const to declare a variable over let whenever possible.
This prevents you from reusing the same variable on several occasions.
But there are occasions you may want the flexibility of being able to change the variable value.
For example, you have to declare the incrementing variable inside a for loop using the let keyword.
Before let was introduced in ES6, var was used in Node to declare variables.
Some developers still use var in their code out of habit.
But as a Node best practice, dont use var in your code any longer.
We can use a code coverage tool to determine the level of test coverage in the program.
Such a tool identifies if there is a decrease in testing coverage and highlights testing mismatches.
Istanbul/NYCis a great tool it’s possible for you to use for this purpose.
you’ve got the option to easily set up NYC to work with your preferred testing framework.
While the first one is more exacting, the second one accepts weaker equalities as well.
This is because Javascript behaves against our intuition during bang out coercion.
Dont store any information in the software itself.
In short, keep your program stateless.
Keeping the server stateless prepares the utility to survive any eventual system failure without damaging its services and performance.
These practices help you to write better code to ensure the best performance of your program.
You may not be able to use all these practices the first time you try.
Pick the one or two you think are the most important and start from there.
Eventually, youll be able to follow all of them when writing Node.js code.
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