Appendix. Installation and setup
If Aurelia is a client-side framework, why do we need Node.js? Aurelia applications are prepared for the browser using the Node.js build tools such as gulp and RequireJS. Even though Aurelia applications don’t require Node.js to run, we do need it to build our project into a deployable package that can be loaded and run in the browser. You can think of this like a compilation step in server-side languages like C, .NET, or Java, where you need a separate set of build tools on your development machine (such as MSBUILD on the Microsoft .NET side, or Javac on the Java side), as compared with what you need to run the deployed executable. This transformation process is summarized in figure A.1.
Figure A.1. Node.js is required to take the ES Next source files for your application and transform them into a package that can be run in the browser.
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Download and install the current Node.js LTS from the Node.js website, https://nodejs.org/en/, using the installation package specific to your environment: