DEV Community

Cover image for Understanding body-parser, cookie-parser, morgan, nodemon, pm2, serve-favicon, cors, dotenv, fs-extra, moment in Express.js
Adeyemi Raji
Adeyemi Raji

Posted on

Understanding body-parser, cookie-parser, morgan, nodemon, pm2, serve-favicon, cors, dotenv, fs-extra, moment in Express.js

Express.js is a web application framework for Node.js that makes it easy to build web applications and APIs. There are a number of middleware modules that are commonly used with Express.js to add additional functionality. Here's a brief description of each:

  1. body-parser: This middleware is used to parse the body of an HTTP request, which can contain JSON data or other types of data. It allows you to access this data in your route handlers and use it to create or modify resources.

  2. cookie-parser: This middleware is used to parse cookies that are sent with HTTP requests. It allows you to read and write cookies in your route handlers, which can be used for things like session management.

  3. morgan: This middleware is used for logging HTTP requests. It can log request details like the method, path, and response status code to a file or the console.

  4. nodemon: This is a utility that automatically restarts your Node.js server when it detects changes in your code. It's often used during development to make it easier to work on your server without having to manually restart it every time you make a change.

  5. pm2: This is a process manager for Node.js applications. It can be used to run your server in the background and monitor it for crashes or other issues. It can also be used to restart your server if it crashes or if you make code changes.

  6. serve-favicon: This middleware serves a favicon (a small icon that appears in the browser's address bar) to the client. It can be used to set a custom favicon for your site or API.

  7. cors: This middleware is used to enable CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) on your server. CORS is a security feature that allows a server to specify which origins are allowed to access its resources.

  8. dotenv: This module is used to load environment variables from a .env file into the process.env object in Node.js. This can be useful for storing sensitive information like passwords or API keys that you don't want to hardcode into your application.

  9. fs-extra: This module is a thin wrapper around the built-in fs module in Node.js, with additional methods for tasks like copying files and creating directories. It can be used to perform file system operations in your route handlers or other parts of your application.

  10. moment: This is a popular library for working with dates and times in JavaScript. It can be used to parse, validate, manipulate, and format dates in your route handlers or other parts of your application.

These are just a few examples of the middleware and utilities that are commonly used with Express.js. There are many other options available, and you can choose the ones that best fit your needs.

Latest comments (1)

Collapse
 
4bhis1 profile image
Abhishek Kumar

Very helpful