20 NODE.JS Modules You Need To Know

Philip Ackermann presents his pick of the Node.js modules that will help you during the development of web applications and more.

- Philip Ackermann

Over recent years Node.js has become more and more popular, and it is now often used for developing the server side of web applications, or in general during the development process. At the time of writing, the homepage of npm – the package manager for Node.js – lists over a quarter of a million modules. I’ve put together a list of the ones I find useful in my daily work as a web and software developer, from image manipulation, string validation and PDF generation to minification, logging and the creation of command line applications.

WORKING WITH IMAGES

1 Manipulate images

www.github.com/aheckmann/gm

GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick are two popular tools for creating, editing, composing and converting images. Thanks to the Node.js module gm you can use both tools directly from within your JavaScript code. The module supports all the typical image operations – resizing, clipping and encoding to name just a few.

const gm = require('gm'); gm('/path/to/image.jpg') .resize(500, 250) .autoOrient() .write(response, error => {});

2 Process images

www.github.com/lovell/sharp

Sharp is based on the ultra-fast libvips image processing library, and claims to be four to five times faster than ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick when it comes to compressing and resizing images. It supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, GIF and SVG images, and outputs data into either JPEG, PNG, WebP or uncompressed raw pixel streams.

3 Generate sprite sheets

www.github.com/Ensighten/sprite smith