How to start a Node.js project

Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself what I’ve learned and sometimes I write them because someone else shares something and I want to remember that better. This post is one of the latter. Starting a Node.js project Usually when I start a new Node.js project I use to generate my initial project. npm npm init then asks me some questions and builds a file for me. Then I start building the project. npm package.json Later I inevitably copy and paste a file from GitHub’s useful repo of templates. And if I remember I’ll actually create a file with the open source license that I intended to use. .gitignore .gitignore LICENSE This is not efficient. Then this week I saw tweet this: Tierney Cyren These four commands do everything that I was doing manually and more, setting up a project for success right from the start. uses the to download a license of choice, in this case the npx license mit license package MIT license uses the to automatically download the relevant file from npx gitignore node gitignore package .gitignore GitHub’s repo uses the to generate the and give your project a code of conduct that will be welcoming to all contributors npx covgen covgen package Contributor Covenant If you’ve not seen [_npx_](https://www.npmjs.com/package/npx) before it looks locally to see if there is a command to run and executes it, if there is no local command it will try to download, install the command from _npm_ , and run it. This is really useful when generating new projects and saves you from globally installing a bunch of _npm_ packages that are only used in this setup mode. accepts all of the default options that asks you about npm init -y npm init Tierney also suggested customising your defaults so that the output of is correct. npm init npm init -y Customising npm init You can see your current config by entering on the command line. To just see the config that affects you can for “init”: npm npm config list npm init grep npm config list | grep init There are a number of defaults you can set; author name, author email, author url, the license, and the version. To set them, you can enter them on the command line or use to open up the config file in your text editor. The command line is easy enough though, you can set all five defaults like so: npm config edit npm set init.author.name "Your name"npm set init.author.email "your@email.com"npm set init.author.url "https://your-url.com"npm set init.license "MIT"npm set init.version "1.0.0" Once you have that customised to your liking, will always produce the right settings. npm init -y Building your own init script There are some improvements that I’d make to Tierney’s commands, though I appreciate he was constrained by Twitter. Here’s a bash script I have come up with inspired by his tweet. function node-project { git init npx license $(npm get init.license) -o "$(npm get init.author.name)" > LICENSE npx gitignore node npx covgen "$(npm get init.author.email)" npm init -y git add -A git commit -m "Initial commit"} To the original I’ve added fetching the license type, the author name and email from the defaults. I’ve also initialised a new git repository and committed the results of this script as the “Initial commit”. npm init You can take this function and add it to your . Then, either or open a new command line window and run . Feel free to add or remove other bits as you see fit to create your perfect initialisation script. ~/.bash_profile source ~/.bash_profile node-project Go start a project Now you have the perfect script to start a Node.js project why not go create a new one. I have a few small projects in mind that I plan to build this year and this is a nice basis to start from. If you have any more suggestions to improve the script, let me know on . Happy open sourcing! Twitter at @philnash Originally published at philna.sh on January 10, 2019.