Let's cut to the chase, if you're planning on building a production level backend NodeJS application, chances are you'll need all or most of these packages:

1.  Express or NestJS for backend API framework
2.  Node-convict and dotenv for configuration management
3.  Joi for API request validations or data validations
4.  Sequelize ORM for MySQL/Postgres databases, or Mongoose for MongoDb
5.  RabbitMQ for publishing/subscribing to message queues, or Kafka for streams and message brokers
6.  Ioredis / node-redis for caching with Redis
7.  Axios for handling third party API integrations. Need a good command of json API calls and response handling
8.  Bull queue or Faktory for delayed/background jobs
9.  Socket.io for real time peer to peer connections
10. Jest/Supertest for unit testing or integration testing and coverage reports
11. Winston / Morgan for logging (use morgan-body if you want to log request / response, useful for debugging in staging and dev environments)
12. Passport.js for authentication, or any custom authentication service using cookie-parser, jsonwebtoken or oath
13. Node-cron for cron jobs
14. Multer for handling file uploads
15. Swagger for OpenAPI documentation (swagger-ui-express or @nest/swagger)
16. Lodash for utilities
17. Luxon for date time manipulation, especially when dealing with timezones
18. ESLint + TSLint + Prettier for static code analysis and formatting
19. Husky for Git hooks
20. Docker for containerisation (Not NodeJS specific, but it helps)

Feel free to comment anything that you also work with on a daily basis!

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