Express Overview

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features to develop web and mobile applications. It facilitates the rapid development of Node based Web applications. Following are some of the core features of Express framework −

• Allows to set up middlewares to respond to HTTP Requests.
• Defines a routing table which is used to perform different actions based on HTTP Method and URL.
• Allows to dynamically render HTML Pages based on passing arguments to templates.

Installing Express

Firstly, install the Express framework globally using NPM so that it can be used to create a web application using node terminal.

$ npm install express --save

The above command saves the installation locally in the node_modulesdirectory and creates a directory express inside node_modules. You should install the following important modules along with express −

• body-parser − This is a node.js middleware for handling JSON, Raw, Text and URL encoded form data.
• cookie-parser − Parse Cookie header and populate req.cookies with an object keyed by the cookie names.
• multer − This is a node.js middleware for handling multipart/form-data.